This recording is being made in Laura Ingalls Wilder Library of Mansfield, Missouri, the home of Missus Wilder.
In nineteen fifty three, nineteen years after the first Little House book was released, librarians in California sent Laura Ingalls Wilder a present for her eighty sixth birthday, and especially they were homemade dolls of every member of the Ingles family. To thank the librarians, Laura recorded a response in the Mansfield, Missouri Library.
I certainly do appreciate the gift of these clanked little figures that seemed to have walked out of my memory Chauvelona.
Though this is the only known recording of Laura's voice, but more.
Than all, I value the understanding and love for me and my family that prompted the gift.
Little House in the Big Woods, the first book in the Little House on the Prairie series, was published ninety years ago this year. As we talked about in our very first episode, the last line of Big Woods reads.
Now is now it can never be a long time ago.
That line might be the most accurate description there is of the Little House series. The books still saw millions of copies, the television show still airs around the world. Little House on the Prairie might be about another time, but Laura's stories are very much alive in our time.
We can't seem to let her go.
Why is Laura still around?
She's just really honestly going to sound like a ridiculous answer, but like why is a cup of tea still around?
It's she's so cozy.
A century and a half after a girl was born in a little log cabin in the big Woods of Wisconsin, her stories continue to hold some timeless truths.
There's a rich family in town at the store who give them a hard time, and there's always a crop failure or blizzard.
Her loco and they cling together and make it through.
I think it's that these are the problems that people really deal with.
Laura is still relevant, although often in ways that can be painful to consider.
Many of the issues that Wilder raises in the Little House Books are issues that are still with us today, and in that sense, her work is more relevant than ever.
We started this podcast in order to have an honest look at the woman behind the books, and what we discovered is that there is a lot more behind Laura than the simple, heartwarming tale of a sixty five year old farm wife deciding to sit down and write about
her life. There is mind blowing poverty, relentless hardship, a father who made a lot of questionable decisions, an extremely complicated, some might say, backstabbing daughter, an authorship conspiracy that won't quite die, a Hollywood star with shiny hair, a perfect jawline and glistening abs.
A lot of violent racism, and.
The funding of some extreme political figures, and an army of fans that has fueled an entire international tourism industry. But where does that leave us? And where does that leave me? A person who has loved Laura so deeply for so long. I went into this project not knowing where our investigation would take us, and not knowing how
I would feel on the other side. And now we're here, and what I feel is complicated, And I'm also shocked at the things that ended up upsetting me the most while making this show.
What if doing this episode makes me never read Little House again?
What I do know is I don't love Laura Ingalls wild or aney less, but I think about her and myself very differently than I did a year ago. You know what they say about truly loving something, sometimes you have to let it go. I'm Glennis McNichol, and this is the final episode of Wilder. We're going to start by going right back to where this entire project began.
On the road. Oh that's you can see the beginning of the bad Lands right over there.
Wow.
Last summer, when we were driving around the Midwest visiting the lower Ingles houses, we didn't end our trip at de smet South Dakota. Unlike the Ingles family, Emily and I kept moving west. There are two sides to the state of South Dakota. The eastern side, where the Ingles lived, is largely farmland, but once you cross the Missouri River, things open up. You pass through a number of Native American reservations, including the Pine Ridge Reservation.
One of the largest in the United States, and Buffalo Gap National Grassland.
A little further is the Badlands National Park, and beyond that the Black Hills.
So that seems like the start of the real Western landscape I've been imagining.
The idea of the American West is at the heart of the idea of America, and despite never moving beyond the actual Midwest, Little House is.
Very much a part of that narrative. Part of the reason we.
Came out on the road was to try and walk in Laura's shoes and see at least some of what she saw.
But we also came out.
Here to get a better sense of the role Laura plays in our understanding of this history. As we drove further west, it became more apparent to us how Laura is connected to American myth making and the sometimes violent prioritizing of the white experience.
Well, I see it.
If you drive into the heart of the Black Hills and follow the many, many signs pointing the way, you will eventually come upon Mount Rushmore's just hollen than I.
That was entirely my first response to I thought, it looks little to me.
I expected to be blown away.
By Mount Rushmore is an iconic American image carved into granite. It's shorthand for the permanence of the American idea of democracy, a tribute to its own greatness, a mascot for America, if you will. It's also carved into an extremely sacred place for Native Americans. And while we all know what Mount Rushmore looks like, to encounter it in the midst of the lush landscape of the Black Hills underscores both its absurdity and the violation of Native American land by the US government.
There's no reason for that to be there.
Other than, Hey, we're here now, so fuck you to everyone who was here before.
In eighteen sixty eight, with the signing of the Fort Laramie Treaty, the US government agreed that the Black Hills would remain exclusively Native land, but once gold was found in the Hills a few years later, the US broke the treaty and white settlers flooded the area. By the nineteen twenties, the Black Hills was a tourist destination for many. To further capitalize on this, the faces of four American presidents were carved in the face of a granite formation
known to the Lakota people as six Grandfather's Mountain. When the monument was finished, this cliff was renamed Mount Rushmore. In nineteen eighty, the US Supreme Court ruled that the US had unlawfully taken control of the Black Hills and offered more than one hundred million dollars to the Sioux Nation, but the Sioux refused the money. To this day, they reject it and insist they want their land back.
A little bit more.
I mean, look at this side without the presidents, Like, look at George Washington's profile up there.
It's just here.
You up, get out, George.
It's so it's so sterile.
Also because you cut through and it's white compared to the red and everything. You could just tell, Wow, it's kind of like a permanent billboard for America. It's like you carved a billboard for America into the Hills.
The Ingles family have a direct connection to the fate of the Black Hills. Mount Rushmore was completed in nineteen forty one. By this point, Laura's younger sister, Carrie was married to a man named David N. Swansea, who was known as the person who named Mount Rushmore, and Carrie's step son Harold, helped carve it. But Laura's connections to the Black Hills goes back even further than that, to
something called the Gordon Stockade. Yes, that's a stockade, right though, Oh oh my god, your destination is all the right. The Gordon Party was a private expedition that illegally ventured into the Black Hills in eighteen seventy four, looking for gold. The reason they did so is because a few months earlier, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer had been sent there to scout a good spot for a military post and reported back
that there was lots of gold. The Gordon Party set out shortly thereafter, and once they reached their destination in October eighteen seventy four, built a stockade and settled in.
For the winter.
Hardcore Little House fans will recognize the Gordon stockade from the book These Happy Golden Years. When Laura's uncle Tom visits the Ingles family and desmet in the chapter titled Springtime, Laura comes home and finds a vaguely familiar man at the table. That man is Tom Kuiner, Ma's youngest brother, who Laura hasn't seen since she was a child. Uncle Tom tells the family of his experience as a member of the Gordon Party, when he was one of the quote first white men that ever laid eyes on the
Black Hills. After surviving the winter, the Gordon Party was forcefully removed by the US cavalry for illegally settling on Native land, and when Uncle Tom gets to this part of the story, it gets a big reaction out of paw Paw was walking back and forth across the room. I'll be darned if I could have taken it, he exclaimed, Not without some kind of scrap. We couldn't fight the
whole United States Army, Uncle Tom said sensibly. But I did hate to see that stockade go up and smoke, I know, Ma said, to this day, I think of the house we had to leave in Indian Territory, just when Charles got glass windows into it.
As a kid.
PA's anger in this scene is the only thing that stood out to me in a chapter that I was otherwise bored by. But as Ma points out, pause anger mirrors the outrage the Ingles felt at being removed from Indian Territory. The lesson in both these instances seems to be that white people have a right to land simply because they want it, and in the Black Hills, the history of this prioritization of white men and the decimation of Native people's land was impossible to miss.
One west.
Three miles after leaving the Black Hills, Emily and I continued on three hundred miles northwest to a spot that represents one of the most extreme versions of this erasure, The Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument in southeastern Montana.
Little Bighorn Battlefield three miles.
In June eighteen seventy six, the Seventh Cavalry, led by Custer was famously defeated by the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapahoe tribes led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. There are a lot of complicated reasons that led to the Battle of the Little Big Horn, including numerous treaties the government made about control of the Black Hills that were not honored, and we've included resources in the show notes for further
reading on this. Even though the Lakota, and Cheyenne and arapa Hoe triumphed over Custer in the Battle of Greasy Grass, as it is known in Native American culture, it was in many ways the last stand of Native American independence in the West.
In the aftermath of.
The battle, most of the remaining Native American tribes were violently pushed onto reservations.
Today, it's widely.
Recognized that Custer's decision to ignore orders and go into battle was foolish and unnecessary. And yet, despite this failure, which resulted in the decimation of the Seventh Cavalry, for many decades Custer was still centered as the hero in this story. Until nineteen ninety one, the location of the battle was known as Custer Battlefield National Monument.
It is wild, the Iron, Lost Cup, the pool, and yet this is still named Custer does It's still glorified.
There's no way to spin this.
Like.
It takes some amazing myth making to make this seem heroic in anyway, Not even Rose Wilderland.
I mean, this is like Rose level.
Of yeah, rewriting history, the gas lighted Yeah.
The Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument is located on the Crow Reservation. Every hour at the visitor center, one of the park rangers gives a talk. There is also a bus tour of the site run by the Crow Agency.
My name Story Chevis, you guys tour guide today.
The bus tour takes you right out into the fields where the battle took place and looking out over all the waving open grassland. It's not that hard to imagine yourself back in eighteen seventy six.
After the right, we're passing the Little Big Porn River. This is the only place in the whole world you'll get to see a reenactment on the actual battle site. They have that every year on the anniversary you just basicedify Foople weekends. We'll also have seven Pobury reenactors who will spend about two weeks, you know, living exactly the way that those soldiers will have.
Pretty interesting.
Afterward, Emily and I stopped at the visitors center hoping to catch one of the park rangers talks. Since we'd arrived, we'd only encountered older, white male rangers, But when we got to the talk, we met Ranger Tanya Gardner, who was not what we were expecting in more ways than one.
The battles the Little.
Big Horn, Why did this battle take place?
What events set up to this battle?
Or I'd like to begin where I'd love to begin this in fourteen ninety two Colma South, the Ocean Blue here what this is up until eighteen sis.
It was immediately clear that Ranger Tanya wasn't just going to tell us about this battle. She was going to tell us how this battle was just one episode in the century's long resistance of Native Americans against colonization.
It's the nineteen hundreds.
There are legal documents being signed out here land deals in the form of what we're called treaties between the people who are here, and the United States government.
When we got back to New York, we couldn't stop thinking about Ranger Tanya's talk, so we called her.
I'm Tanya. My maiden name is plain Feather, and I'm my married name is Gardner, and I'm married.
To a Cheyenne.
I'm I'm from Lodgegras, Montana.
Are you the only park ranger who is local or who is Native American?
There?
There's a few that work there, but not like the seasonal rangers there. I'm the only one, and there's been like I don't know how many countless seasons where I've been only female.
It had felt to both Emily and I when we were at the site that Tanya was shouldering the enormous responsibility of giving context to an event that had been simplified to almost cartoonish proportions in American history, a history that, like pause outrage over being removed from quote Indian territory, centered the white experience as the only one of value.
What had struck us most strongly about Tanya was that she'd immediately gone to the origins of the myth making behind both Custer and America.
The event that led up to this battle I always start with, didn't start in eighteen seventy six. We're going to go all the way back to fourteen ninety two Columbus South the Ocean blue, and he discovers America and all the misconceptions that we have there with just that statement and not knowing and not having that right information in our history books. Where the way that they hold him up to this high you know, he did all
these great things and he really didn't. That's where the seed of that stuff.
I was curious whether Tanya received any sort of pushback when she did her talks. She told us the response very much shifts depending on the age of the visitors, and that younger age groups that have had access to more diverse cultural narratives have a much different take.
It goes with different age groups, and I think that people that are my age, they come up and they're like, oh, this, yes, this was crap. You know this, I can't believe. You can't really tell you know what you really want to tell.
Older generations, on the other hand, feel a much closer connection to Custer.
You have a lot of baby boomers, and they're kind of like the last kind of old school I would call them that there's still in love with Custer. There's a tremendous amount of people out there that are custom Bucks. They think he was right and he was honorable. But we have to think back to that time when they didn't have all these different types of heroes, so you know, they looked to the types of things like.
A war hero.
This idea of needing a hero is where Custer overlapped directly with Laura. For me, Tanya's observations reminded me of something doctor w Reese had said when we talked to her.
Part of what I was realizing when I left our reservation and went to graduate school was how ignorant people are about who Native people are.
Doctor de Wie Reese is a scholar and educator who runs a website called American Indians in Children's Literature.
And that became very clear at the University of Illinois because it had a mascot that was quote unquote an Indian. And when I got to Illinois and there was this mascot, and people would invite me to come to their civic organization or whatever it was, and they wanted me to dance, and they wanted me to story and I said, well, I'm not a dancer. I don't dance that way. We dance in a spiritual way at a certain time of the year in a certain place, and so no, I
won't dance. And they said, well can you? Can you tell stories? And I said no, I'm not a storyteller either. I am a professor. I want to be a professor. Nobody wanted that. They wanted someone to perform Indians for them, and I thought, what is going on? These are in theory, very very smart people in this area.
But it was.
It was so it spoke to the power of the mascot.
A mascot and how do we wield mascots?
Anyone who's been to a sports game knows is with bluntness and little space for anyone else. The Dictionary definition of a mascot is quote a person, animal, or object that is believed to bring good luck, or one that represents an organization. A mascot is an image we rally behind that represents a way of being and one that gives us identity.
This idea of mascots was very.
Much on our mind when Emily and I went to the Laura Ingalls House in Mansfield, Missouri, last September to attend Wilder Days. We're much like the pageants people loved dressing up as Laura.
Plenty of girls in prairie outfits, but there's a handful of men, I would say, in.
Their fifties and sixties, wearing some guys wearing suspenders.
In Yah.
Of all the ways I'd considered Laura, it was only after this conversation with Doctor Reese and our trips out west and down South, but I began to think of her as a mascot for many things, as a representative of some sort of ideal. A girl with enormous agency, frontier woman who lived with and against nature, a woman who had it ventures and wrote them down. She was an image I hoisted up as proof of identity, an
evidence of what was possible. I didn't put her on a T shirt or a baseball cap, but I stabled a whole lot of yarn braids to my hats. Laura as the mascot for the team I wanted to be on felt a lot closer to my own experience. But to understand who I was willing to leave behind in order to be a member of this team. What this mascot of Laura's pioneer girlhood erased was something I had to come to terms with.
I grew up completely obsessed with the Little House Books.
It all starts with Laura Ingalls right, my.
Little House Books for Christmas gifts, inscribed to me by my mother.
I was six years old, and I loved those books. I still do.
Considering Laura under the guys of a mascot felt like the missing piece and the larger Little House puzzle. Mascots are created by organizations. Many hands go into their making.
Part of the magic of the Little House Books, and one of.
The reasons people including me, have such passionate feelings about them is because they are so successful at creating intimacy. We're not reading about Laura, We're living with Laura, and yet we know this is not the case.
The Little House Books.
And their entire legacy were very carefully crafted by Laura, indefinitely by Rose, then to a lesser extent, by the book publishing industry. Then they were crafted again by Hollywood. Laura the writer may have just wanted to recounter life, but Laura Ingles, the character, very intentionally represents something larger. This raises an important question if Laura is a mascot for a team? What are the other teams and who was representing them? What stories about girls and women in
this part of the country are we not telling. A few years ago I stumbled across a story about the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Included was in aside that the Cheyenne believed a Cheyenne woman named Buffalo calf Road Woman may have been the person who caused Custer's death.
This astounded me.
Why was this not a more well known fact, especially considering the cultural footprint of Custer. I asked Tanya if she knew about Buffalo calf Road Woman. It turns out Buffalo calf Road Woman is quite famous in Cheyenne history.
She's also known for being part of the Battle of the Rosebud or she picks up her brother because the Chaya's called that the battle or the saved her brother. That's what they refer to the Battle of the Rosebuda, the.
Battle of the Rosebud, or the battle where the girls saved her brothers, the Cheyenne referred it took place a week before the Battle of the Little Big Horn, during the battle when all hope seemed to be lost for the Cheyenne, Buffalo Calffrod Woman went out onto the battlefield by herself to save her fallen brother. This action rallied the Native American forces and they defeated the US cavalry led by George Crook. This is why the Cheyenne named the battle after her.
That's where I shine the light on her is in the Battle of the Rosebud, because they actually named it after her.
Whether or not it was Buffalo calff Road Woman who was responsible for Custer's death, maybe secondary to why we don't know who killed him. The Cheyenne passed down their history orally, not in written form, but after the Battle of the Little Big Horn, many participants went silent for fear of retribution. It was only after a century of self impost silence that the Cheyenne revealed Buffalo caff Road Woman's role in the battle.
After the battle, the United States time is going to spread noxense, going after anyone that's not on the reservation. And then if they are on the reservation, they're still going to come after you. And anybody associated with Custer Battle that you know, that's what it's called back then, would be horribly persecuted. So they didn't talk about it.
Nobody did.
The story of Buffalo Caffrod woman has all the heroic elements of an epic American tale, far more than Custer, and yet she remains nearly anonymous in mainstream culture. Women not getting a fair shake from history is hardly new. One of the reasons so many of us, and I include myself here in the strongest terms, cling to Laura is that she is a strong female role model, and for most of history there have been very few of those.
The devotion so many of us feel towards Laura is not surprising, but it becomes a concern when this sort of devotion takes up so much space that it doesn't leave room for other narratives.
I mean, Emily, what is your take on how empty it is?
It's very empty.
We on the Wyoming side we were seeing like ruins of ranches or active ranches, and now there's absolutely nothing.
This stretch of the country is notorious for modern day reasons, having nothing to do with Custer or the so called Old West.
In late twenty nineteen, the Crow tribe declared a state of emergency. Tribal chairman aj not Afraid cited a list of issues, including the failure to address the murdered and missing women crisis.
In a story published earlier this year tied to a docuseries called Murder and Bighorn about the epidemic, the Guardian reported quote, Montana has one of the worst missing or murdered rates for Indigenous women in the country. Driving back and forth on this road, I thought a lot about who is deemed worthy of a story, and this led me to consider even more how the story of Laura
is wielded. What does Laura's appeal say about what we want to believe and who are we willing to leave out for that comfort Because to many people, Laura is very comforting.
She fulfills these basic traits that we need, oh, you know, putting a baby to sleep, or reading somebody a book, or just you know, even though nothing about the books that actually happens, it is comforting.
That's Lizzie Skernick, writer and children's literature professor at NYU.
There's nothing comforting about like living in a mud hut.
She's able to make everything comforting and cozy.
And I think that is a fundamental desire of human beings.
I have read the Little House Books hundreds of times when I was a kid, the worst parts of the books only flagged to me as evidence that Ma was invested in Laura not enjoying herself, similar to how I sometimes felt about my own mother, and that Paw was exciting, which was similar to how I felt about my own father as a child. As a grown up, I recognize the racism in the books, and I also recognize that so many cultural things we loved growing up are very problematic.
This is something that came up on our road trip a lot. On our second night in man Cato, after a long day of interviews, we just I had to order room service and camped out in front of the TV.
Much to our delight, a childhood favorite of Joe.
And Minds was showing sixteen Candles, a sleepover staple that neither of us had actually seen in years. It does not hold up, to put it mildly, but Joe especially had a strong reaction.
I mean, I'm like almost ready to start a petition to make sixteen channels not being put out.
Of the times.
Wow, we need to put the mic out. Okay, what a one eighty Joe. I was so horrified by that movie. I do not want and I can actually see different themes in my own life, and I was like, oh, all right, you know whatever, you get black out drunk, and like, who knows what happens. I don't think that movie should be on television anymore.
There is no getting around the fact that looking at some of the things that made us who we are can be painful. Even with all this knowledge, it remains impossible for me not to understand Laura as a source of good in my own life. What she gave me in terms of possibility, an example of how to be complicated, a girl who loves it venture and clothes, who loves problematics, sometimes damaging parents, and maybe most importantly, how to be
a writer. I was able to love these things because the damaging parts of the book didn't feel like they were doing damage to me, and even if they were, how much I loved the rest of it made up for that. And then, during the recording of the Problem of Laura episode, I read out loud the parts of the books that Little House comes under fire for the most. As I said the words out loud, I was shocked
to discover that I actually felt physically ill. She says to Pa quote Paw, get me that Little Indian Baby. I want it, I want it, she begged.
Oh what if doing this.
Episode makes me never read Little House again? My reading this out loud has actually been way more upsetting to me than the reread. And it was not easy for the producers in the room either.
Pah, when I look at you, guy, when you're like this stressful to listen to this.
There is, after all, a difference between reading and saying, between sliding over the parts with your eyes that are a problem and putting them out in the world with your own voice. And the saying out loud part was where it turns out the buck stopped for me.
My god, this episode is really upsetting. It's so much different to say it out loud. Maybe that's the thing. Everyone should have to read these books out loud. I considered it.
I realized I'd only read the books to myself all these years that I had been able to internalize Laura without much mediation. I immediately thought back to doctor Reese and her belief that The Little Housebook should be taken out of children's classrooms.
Part of what was shocking to me as I tried to have conversations with people about the books is that I had asked them to consider that sentence the only good Indian is a dead Indian, and I'd asked them to think about the impact that line has on that Native child in the classroom, And I asked them, would you really do that? You know, would you really do that? And they say yes, I mean, without hesitation, it was yes,
because that's the way it was. That's the way they thought back then, and had all kinds of rationalizations for that, and none of the rationalizations centered on the experience of that Native child. And that was really hard because part of what I think that we as a society think is that we send our kids to teachers in schools. I mean, we're giving them our children, and we trust in some way that they are not going to be hurt by their teachers and what happens in their clussures.
What I was left with was this question, is the fact the Little House Books brought me glynnis a lot of joy enough to justify the violence they had the power to inflict on others. After the break, we're going to talk through how and where we think the Little House Books belong and also hear from listeners on whether
they too are thinking about Laura and Little House. Differently, what would you say to me that I struggled to let go of my love for these books even as I recognize the harm that they do.
I would tell you, and this is something that I actually do in my workshops, is that I share my own attachment to the Five Chinese Brothers. You know, I can like smell that book when I say the title, because it's one that I read, and what you know, in first grade I learned to read this is one of the books I read. I thought it was awesome.
But then when someone asked me to reconsider the book and the images that they were in there, I'm like, yeah, you're right, and I own that and I admit that, And so I talk about that and how it kind of stings, It kind of hurts, and you feel kind of stupid because, yeah, why didn't I see that before? But it does take a conversation to be able to see something and start the journey of letting go of a particular book.
I decided the best people to have this conversation with were Joe and Emily, the two women who had come out on the road with me more than a year ago to try and figure out how I felt about Laura. So, guys were at the end of the Wilder podcast, which we started eighteen months ago.
We have read all the.
Books, We've talked to, all of the people, we have driven around the country, We've done hundreds of hours of interviews, and so I thought this would be a really good time for us all to sort of sit down in separate locations and sort of talk through what we've learned and if our thinking has changed.
How does everyone feel?
Well, Glynn, I think you're the first person that should answer that, because when we started this whole wild journey, you weren't sure exactly what you were going to find and whether after you've found whatever it was, you would still be able to love Laura in the same way. And after all of this, after this journey of epic proportions, literally literally, how do you feel now?
I still I have such deep love for Laura the person, like the individual writer who sat down and wrote it. But I think coming to terms with the fact that these books are not just a story that came directly out of her head as she was experiencing it, and really understanding that these books were a production of more than a few people, some of them very unlikable, and Laura has very unlikable parts of her, and so I really sort of split my thinking between the person and the product.
I really like what you just said about splitting your feelings, and I think that's a very modern way of looking at creative production at a brand. And that's what I think about a lot when I think about celebrities or when I think about influencers, And all right, can I enjoy this movie that has been made by a director who is terrible in real life? Can I enjoy Michael Jackson with my kids, knowing what I know about him
as a human? And so I think that this is a bigger thing that so many of us scrapple with with art.
Can we enjoy art.
If we discover things we don't like about the human being behind it, because all human beings are flawed in different ways.
Yeah, And the interesting thing in this case is I'm struggling less with Laura the individual. I recognize that she was complicated and had a lot of problems, but that's less difficult for me to accept because that just feels like every human than her art, which I am struggling with. And part of what's so complicated about that that we've talked about is her art is so much about her.
That speaks to.
Something that has come up from a lot of listeners too when we criticize Laura, which is she was a person of her moment. She was writing what she knew at the time, and when I think about the individual, I can recognize there's some truth to that, although lots of people in the nineteenth century knew that Indian removal was bad, and we have to hold her to today's standards because she exists as a relevant thing in twenty
twenty three. So I keep thinking of it like you're allowed to look at an antique car and say, well, it was built in nineteen twenty three, but it doesn't mean it doesn't have to pass inspection to be allowed on the road. And I feel like what we've been doing with Laura is holding her up to twenty twenty three inspection to say should you still be on the road.
Essentially, you know, do you pass this inspection? And if you don't, what do we do about that.
I am so aware of all the good she brought to my life, but my life as a little white girl in suburban Toronto with highly educated parents and a wealth of resources is not everyone's life. I might love my nineteen twenty three car, but is it dangerous to be on the road like it's it's yeah.
I don't think you shouldn't drive.
That car right right?
It has to be updated. And I also think, like the flip side of that is, I can't unlove something that had a positive effect on me to the degree she did. I can only recognize that I loved her so much. I was willing to gloss over and not be bothered by all the problems. But I still you know, even reading parts of the book. I mean, parts of them are really upsetting, as we heard, but it's just like there is a magic to them. I get why I love them. I still love them.
I think you're allowed to still love them.
I think you're allowed to still love them and to also think critically about them and to talk critically about them.
How do you guys feel, Joe, you came to this with very little knowledge, so you have the coldest eye on this of the three of us.
You know, what I really enjoyed during this journey was experiencing the magic. It was actually really fun to experience the magic through your eyes, but as an outsider, I think the problems were always just so so clear to me with the TV show with the books. But all of that said, I don't think that they shouldn't be read anymore. I don't think they should be banned. I don't think they should be taken off library shelves. I do think that they should be approached with critical discussion
and a critical eye. But I also think there's a lot of good in there that it would be a real shame to remove.
From the world.
Emily, what do you think You knew the show, You were familiar with the books, but you love the show, so yeah, yeah, I was a show lover.
But I've really done the crash course in all aspects of Laura. In the past year. I reread all of the books. We took the two week long and then extra weekend road trip to all the sites, and to keep going with your car passing inspection metaphor, I think you have to make sure that everything is up to your standards. But then it's so important to go out there and get on the road because if we had made this all just in a vacuum in the studio,
like it would be a completely different show. I think like half the insights we got to we wouldn't have even thought of because seeing how Laura landed in every specific place, from like seeing her embraced at Laura's sites like Walnack Grove and De Smet, but then going out to Custer and being in the middle of Native reservations
and understanding how this lands differently with different audiences. Putting yourself in the shoes of people who are not white and who have been harmed by this narrative definitely has made me come to the conclusion that I don't think these should be taught in anything besides a higher level literature class or history class. I don't think they should be taught to young kids in classrooms. I think they
can still be read. I really hope that one day there will be additions for children to understand all of the context, so that that's what parents can read to their children. But so, yeah, I don't think they should be banned, but I do think we should filter how they're understood.
Yeah, I think for me, the more painful conclusion I've come to. I've given this book set to every friend that's had a child. It was my go to you know, baby gift for a long time, and I wouldn't do that anymore. It's too violent. In in perfect world, how I'd like to see these books package because I don't think they should be taken off shelves. I think we're we're seeing books being taken off shelves and I can't support that at all.
But I think the books need to be packaged.
I think a lot of the Disney movies now, which come when you start watching an old Disney movie, they come with this It's almost like a content warning of like, what you're about to watch is really problematic, and we recognize that. I think the books themselves need to be packaged with enormous context of who were the Native Americans that Laura watched leave quote unquote Indian Territory and what is their story? And it needs to be in the books in a way that makes it just as engaging
as what you're reading. So I think it should be included in every one of these box sets. But I also think the largest solution to this is that, and this is already happening. We know from talking to Lizzie's college classes, the spotlight needs to be moved away from Laura, right, like Laura shouldn't occupy this much space in children's classrooms or in children's literature.
There needs to be so much more space for the other stories.
And I think you know, Shena, one of our other producers asked me earlier if I had the choice of giving up Laura and substituting her with someone who is less of a problem. And I think it brings me joy right now to know that I can give other books to kids with better representation, like I can let go. That's what I think I meant at the beginning of this when I say, you know, when you love something, you have to let it go.
I can still love her.
Eight year old Glynnis loves her, but I can find other things to give to other kids, and hopefully they experience that degree of joy with stories that are less.
Violent and less capable of harm.
I guess I want kids to feel the degree of joy and passion I felt, but about better in different stories, and so then that becomes, you know, The challenge I think, certainly for those of us devoted enough to Little House, is to invest in finding what those others stories are and providing those stories. I don't have to be giving
Little House out to anyone. I can just have my Little House memory and don't need to pass it on, I guess is my end result of this, which sort of makes me a little sad, But it makes me not sad too, because I think, oh, there's other stuff there. There's other stuff out there, and there's other joys for kids to have that I just want them to have the joy.
It doesn't have to be about the same story I had.
Yeah, And I think one of the things that really did change my mind about Little House, and I think this is true for a lot of our listeners too, is when we started to talk about Rose and all of the ways that she was involved in writing and
editing the books. And there was one really key fact about our favorite line now is now it can never be a long time ago, which closes the end of the first book, and it's that a lot of scholars, like Caroline Fraser particularly, think that Rose might have written that line.
What do you think about that? I mean, as a kid, Rose would have devastated me. As a grown up, I just recognized all the things Joe and I talked about about having a great editor and complicated relationships.
So knowing Rose came up with that line. At this point, I just think I have mainlined Rose in a way that I this is. You know, when I talk about inhaling these books, I thought I was mainlining Laura.
I was mainlining white a lot of Rose.
And of course Rose is responsible for the line that sums up the entire book.
She enabled Laura to be a genius, and that is.
Extraordinary, and it might be that she articulated a truth about Laura better than Laura did. So it kind of, to be quite honest with you, it feels sort of perfect that a woman who refused to be associated as a writer of the book, who tried to undermine her mother at every turn, is also responsible for the truest line in the entire series.
So it's like, that's a perfect distillation of this entire series.
To be it is the perfect essence of I like what you said, that was already in Laura's work, and then Rose just was able to package the essence of it.
There's no Laura, there's Rose and Laura.
So in my DNA, when I talk about Laura's in my DNA, like Rose is in there too.
Great Should we move on to listener comments.
Yes, it's been so interesting to read all the comments and reviews from people, and it feels like they fall into one of two camps of criticism, which is either I still love Laura too much or we're being far
too critical of Laura. But I'm really interested to know, you know, everyone who sent in their voice memos, and we're so grateful for everyone who did, whether they have been experiencing a similar struggle to what I've been going through over the last year, and whether there's an overlap in their respect this with mine.
Hi.
My name is Karen.
I am a black female who grew up in the seventies and loved the Little House books, reading Little Town on the Prairie and The Menstrual Show. When I was a child, I always felt uncomfortable, but back then I didn't have language for what was happening to me. But reading Prairie Fires and listening to this podcast, I just see the racism within those books and am very torn about how I feel about them now High Wilder Podcast.
My name is Maddie.
I was raised in a very fundamentalist homeschooling community, religious homeschooling community, and it's interesting as y'all were talking about kind of these like libertarian ideals going over your head as a child.
While I was reading them as a child, the.
Adults in my life who were encouraging me to read these were drawing them my attention to them and using it as an education like they are being forced out of Indian territory because big government is bad, that kind of thing.
You know.
I still have family in these communities.
I am not a part of it anymore.
But I talked to my nieces who are being homeschooled in that community, and you know, talk to them a little bit about their experience with the book, and they said that it's still going on, that's still kind of the message being attached with the books. I think that it just adds a layer of complication on how we
should be approaching these books with children. I don't know if I'll read them to mine, honestly, because I don't know if I would want that propaganda shared with them if they're not old enough to comprehend it.
My name is Caitlin. I was born into a family that or the Little House series. Most of my ancestors lived in eastern South Dakota at the same time she did. People today talk about how important representation is to kids, and I agree. I think that's why I adored Laura so much. There aren't many famous people who come out of South Dakota, but she was. She made me proud
of who I was and where I lived. She was me, and if she could do great things, so could I. Modern South Dakota can be like the one Laura lived in, but can also be much different. A lot of your podcast has discussed the return to the prairie esthetic, but the prairies are emptying because of rural flight. There is some sense of community, but it's mostly reserved for those with the right last name. Outsiders are not very welcome. So my opinion on Laura has changed with the times
and especially with this podcast. But I still want to read these books to my kids someday because our ancestors lived like Laura, and I feel it's important to teach my future children about their past. But I feel that I now have a more educated and mature view of the books and now how to use it as an educational tool rather than a propaganda tool.
Hello, my son is getting married soon and his bride is Indigenous, and I imagined reading these things to my future grandchildren who would be indigenous, and it was pretty horrifying to see how it might be seen through their eyes. Whereas before, when somebody would bring it up, I would think, well, you can't apply modern sensibilities to the past.
People lived in their times.
There are things that our grandchildren will be horrified by that we do every day without thought. But I don't think it's appropriate for children anymore, and that sads me immensely.
I'm someone who loves the Little House Books and I've written about them. I've thought of myself as pretty clear eyed about these issues in the books, and I figured I'd just done all that reconciliation work. So I have to say I really was not prepared for episode seven to hit me the way it did, you know, with the college class and just hearing how the Little Housebooks how they look to younger generations.
That was a little rough. But also I get it.
I think a lot of people who hold onto the books a certain way really try everything to avoid those feelings. And I get that too, But I'm thinking now that the more you let yourself just have those feelings, the more you realize how little it really costs you to acknowledge the other perspectives you know and just give them spacing your head. Okay, So, I guess here's a metaphor. I actually made a pigs bladder balloon, and anyone who who has done that knows how horrifying it is in
real life. I mean like it looks like something like a serial killer would play with. But you can still hold that idea you had when you were a kid of you know, this pig ladder being just a fun balloon that is inside a pig, like a cracker Jack prize, and you can let that exist alongside the reality that it looks disgusting.
What's so interesting about all this listener feedback is that we all seem to be struggling with similar things, and it's you know, further evidence that it's hard to interrogate the things you loved as a kid because it's so it runs so deep and it can be painful. So many of us are in the same place of wanting to do so and struggling to do so, and you know, coming up with similar answers. Once again, Little House is the zeitgeist of of reckoning with childhood love.
Once again. It's complicated.
Okay, well, Glennis, maybe one of the final questions I have for you is how do you think about yourself differently? Or what did you learn about yourself making this entire show.
I mean, really understanding the degree to which I allowed things to be acceptable simply because I was so.
Relieved to see a.
Version of how I was in the world in a
character is upsetting and really makes you consider. I don't know if selfishness is the right word, but all the things we let pass by because of our own enjoyment and enjoy and then subsequently flipping that and trying to understand not just the pain of not seeing a version of yourself in the world, but the pain of seeing a terrible version of yourself in the world, which is what happens in these books to not people and in so much of the narratives we have, and thinking about,
you know, just what I was willing to tolerate for my own pleasure into some degree survival.
Is something I continue to think about. But I also think about this.
I lived in the Little House Books for most of my childhood, and then the second I could, I stepped through the map on my parents' family room floor.
You can see Lake.
Preston, and then right to the left of that is to Smith and attempted to recreate what I had learned from Laura. I wrote, I traveled, I had and continue to have adventures, and I have a deep belief in the value of even the smallest parts of these stories. I took to heart some of the messages I found in Little House about honesty, bravery, adventure, and then we applied it to the person who gave it to me in the first place. And you've been listening to us
do that. Thank you for coming along for the ride. Laura was a complicated, resilient, fascinating person, and it's been strangely wonderful to discover and accept that she is a problem.
You want to hold on to her. You have to hold onto that too, and then keep going.
There are other stories, and there are other nails, and it might be time for this to be a very long time ago.
Let's just maybe think of it.
Okay, I don't actually know where her grave is, but how big is this grape song? It's just that for the ones that look flowered, maybe, yeah.
Wilder graves that way. It says it over there, oh here?
Sure, though, I still go through the graveyard behind my house and try and find people who were born in.
Eighteen sixty seven, because they were born and the same.
Year Laura was yeah, yeah, Wilder, it's just a big stone, that says Wilder.
Oh, here we go, they have more. Okay, that was the backside. Apparently ninety is a solid a yeah for what Laura ingles and.
I mean months was ninety two.
Yeah.
It's like everything in.
Those books they could they were so close to death so many times, but she made it.
She made it right here.
I have to say I have no emotional connection to people's graves, and because I grew up behind your graveyard your people are buried does not have resonance for me where they lived.
Like, yeah, going to dismess.
Is so much more emotional.
Or listening to pause fiddle and visiting a grave.
I don't know.
Isn't that kind of crazy that we're standing on top of her them.
We're not sitting on top We're standing on top of her remains.
This whole entire podcast is.
Standing on top of her right.
Wilder is written and hosted by me Glennis McNichol. Our story editors are Emily Meronoff and Joe Piazza. Our senior producer is Emily Meronoff. Our producers are Mary Do, She Knows Zaki and Jessica Crinchich. Our associate producer is Lauren Phillip. Production help from Asavarey Sharma, sound design and mixing by Amanda Rose Smith. Our amazing theme song and additional music was composed by Alice McCoy. We are executive produced by
Joe Piazza, Nikki Aetore, Ali Perry and Me. Final special thanks to Ranger Tanya Gardner, Heatherley McFarlane and Pauline Facon from Bonzen Studio in Paris, Laura Ingles Wilder Home Association for the recording of Laura's voice Upsalquate tours at the Little Big Horn Battlefilip National Monument, Doctor DeBie Reese and Professor Lizzie Skernick, and every one of you who sent
in your thoughts and feedback. As always, please see our show notes for further reading and links for the subjects we discussed in this episode.
That's it for Wilder. Thank you so much for listening.
We're going to keep posting on Instagram and TikTok, so keep an eye out. There may be more bonus content and news.
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