7. The Problem of Laura

This episode contains racist depictions and racial slurs from The Little House Books.

Listeners, please be advised.

The name of one of the nation's best known children's authors is being removed from a major literary award.

In June twenty eighteen, the Children's Division of the American Library Association, the group that gives out coveted children's book awards like the Newbery Medal and the Caldecott Medal, announced that, after much consideration, they were renaming their prestigious Laura Ingalls Wilder Award.

The Association for Library Service to Children unanimously voted this weekend to rename the Laura Ingles Wilder Award the Children's Literature Legacy Award. Due to negative depictions of Native Americans and African Americans and Wilder's books.

It would now be called the Children's Literature Legacy Award.

Here was their reasoning.

Although Wilders were called a significant place in the history of children's literature and continues to be read today, ALSC has had to grapple with inconsistency between Wilder's legacy and its core of values of inclusiveness, integrity, and respect.

You will probably not be shocked to hear that people were upset and angry, outraged. Even it demonstrated the reach of Laura and Little House. It wasn't just regular fans who were upset. People like William Shatner aka Captain Kirk were very, very angry and took to Twitter to express that anger.

I find it disturbing that some take modern opinion and obliterate the past isn't progress learning from our mistaches.

Like a lot of young readers, I loved Laura obviously. If you've made it this far and wilder, you know this, and growing up, nothing that is in the books bothered me. Nothing stood out as a problem. But Laura is a problem.

You know.

You push together this coziness with the decimation of Native.

Tribes, or with you know, the.

Erasure and bigotry about black people, and even the marrying off of girls who are very young, and you just have this confusing diet.

But of course that's America.

And the problems of Laura are also disturbingly relevant.

I think it's important for us to remember that our past isn't always rosy, that there were controversies, There was, and racism is still part of our culture now. If we pretend the past was not as controversial and difficult and racist as it was.

Then, how we're going to deal with the racist issues who are grappling with today.

When we first envision this podcast, this was the question I was asking myself, how should I feel about Laura Ingalls Wilder. I'm obviously not a kid anymore. I'm a grown up, educated woman. I recognize all the problems with the books, So what should I be doing with my love of Laura?

Now?

This question is really just a niche version of what the country has been asking itself about itself for a while now, what some citizens have been pointing out for centuries, and it's a question that finally went mainstream after twenty sixteen. We've all been asked to consider what we love and how we love it, and often whether we should be letting it go. From historical statues to entire systems of government to deeply beloved children's books. Letting go of Laura

We were indeed disturbed by your letter. We knew that missus Wilder had not meant to imply that Indians were not people. I must admit that no one here realized the words read as they did reading them now. It seems unbelievable to me that you are the only person who has picked them up and written to us about them in the twenty years since the book was published.

Nordstrom then relayed that when Laura had been alerted to the line, she'd called it a quote stupid blunder.

Of course Indians are people.

I did not intend to imply they were not. Nordstrom went on to assure the reader the line would be changed for all future editions. If you buy the book today, the line now reads, there were no settlers, only Indians lived there.

Half a while.

Used the right lade to take the US seventy five rant too.

Independence.

It's late September and our producer, Emily and I are driving to the Little House in the Prairie Museum outside Independence, Kansas. We are a three hour drive from Kansas City and another three hours from Oklahoma City.

We're really, for real in the middle of the country.

Yeah, Kansas, baby, Like, there's something about Wyoming that feels.

Seventy five south for four miles.

Wild and west. But this just feels very, I don't know, middle of nowhere.

In the opening chapter of Little House on the Prairie, when the Ingles set out from peppin Wisconsin, pa asked Laura, quote, do.

You like going out where the Indians live?

Laura said she liked it, and then asked if they were in Indian country now, but they were not. It was a long long way to Indian territory. The little house Emily and I are driving toward is the one pa illegally built when the Ingles arrived at their destination, the Osage Diminished Reserve, what is now southeastern Kansas. The site of this museum is the presumed location of the Little House in the book Little House on the Prairie,

To point the location.

We arrived shortly before closing hours wow after hours admission. But just as we're about to wander the site, a woman named Ronda appears.

I decided to know I.

Close up everything aside that you can walk the rounds as long as.

Oh, well, thank you, We're going to commit before them.

Ronda is the person in charge of the museum today, and she is dressed in full prairie garb, complete with bonnet. On the museum grounds is a recreation of the little log cabin that Pap build for his family, and they believe the well out back is the actual one. Laura writes about Pap building in the book farm house was.

Here around eighteen eighty and the post left around eighteen seventy one.

Based on the eighteen seventy census in the well and back, they're pretty sure that this is the area where the Eagles were illegally squatting in Indian Territory for about a year and a half.

H Emily and I had wondered on the way here how the museum would describe the Engle's time on the Osage Diminished Reserve. I asked Rhonda if squatting was the word she used with visitors. It is not a word used in the book.

They were squatting, there's no ens abs or bits about it.

They didn't pay for the land.

They were here illegally. So you can't take away something that happened. Let's talk about what actually happens in this book.

Little House on the Prairie is by far the most controversial book in the Little House series. This is the book that adults are shocked by when they returned to it to read to their own children. It's the book that often requires them to either skip entire passages or stop and do a lot of explaining.

Here's writer Rebecca Taster.

I would say, you know, at the first mention of Indians or whatever, would I would say, okay, so let

The closest the book gets to implying that the Ingles are building on land that doesn't belong to them is that they are in a place called Indian territory. But there are plenty of other parts in the book that are not subtle at all. They are unequivocally racist. The most violent line from the book comes from the Ingles neighbors, the Scots, who say more than once quote the only good Indian is a dead Indian end quote. Laura also tells us quote Jack hated Indians, and Ma said she didn't blame him.

End.

Quote.

In the book, Laura describes Native Americans entering the ingles illegally constructed house. First time it happens Ma's home alone, and the Native Americans eat all the food she is cooking.

Quote.

The naked wild men stood by the fireplace. Their faces were bold, fierce, and terrible. These wild men had no hair. Another time, two Native Americans come into the house who are quote dirty, scowling, and meat. They take all the corn bread, all the fur, all paws tobacco, but then drop the fur on the way out. At the end of the chapter, Laura asked Pa, quote, will the government make these Indians go west?

Paw tells her yes. Quote.

When white settlers come into a country, the Indians have to move on. The government is going to move these Indians farther west any time.

Now.

That's why we're here, Laura.

White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick. Laura does not leave a lot of room for interpretation when it comes to the opinions that the people around her express, but she doesn't pass judgment on them either. A lot of people, even those who are not Laura apologists, will tell you that in Little House on the Prairie, Laura was merely relaying what she heard others.

Say their childhood memories, and the child's interpretation of the situation not necessarily filtered through an adult lens.

That kind of memoir approach.

This is how I remember it, this is how I saw it at this time, and I know my childhood memories are not always accurate.

Gwen Westerman is a professor at Minnesota State University, man Cato and the director of the Native American Literature Symposium.

Trying to view her stories through her childhood memories is a much different experience as a reader than coming in and say, here are all the terrible things that are said about Indians, and from what I've found, none of those things are Laura's thoughts. Those are the words that she remembers hearing.

Adult Laura the writer does through her fictional child self, provides some necessary pushback to these views. Early on in the book, not long after the Ingles arrive in what they call Indian Territory, Laura asks her mother, quote, why don't you like Indians, Ma, to which mav replies, quote, I just don't like them, and don't lick your fingers. But Laura persists, this is Indian country, isn't it. She says, what did we come to their country for if you

This is the extent of the questioning that happens.

The defense that Laura is offering a child's view of this experience is valid, and that Ma personally is terrified is understandable. She's alone miles from other settlers, with three young girls and a husband who, while charming, behaves erradically.

I wouldn't exaggerate how much she may have known about the history.

Laura's biographer, Caroline Fraser, thinks there were limits to Laura's knowledge.

She tried to find out the name of the chief who her father may have encountered, but she didn't do very much in the way of reading history that we know of, and so I don't really know how much she knew. She did know that the land that her father had built on did not belong to ho much.

That conception of fairness is, I think at the heart of what's most troubling in this book. Laura seems unable or unwilling to fully understand Native Americans as human beings. I want to turn to a specific scene in the final chapters of Little House on the Prairie. If you're familiar with the books, you've probably been wondering why we

River Valley every night for a week leave.

The Ingles stand in front of their home as the osage foul by the house on their horses. Laura has a quote naughty wished to be a little Indian girl. Of course, she did not really mean it. She only wanted to be naked in the wind and the sunshine and riding one of those gay little ponies.

End quote.

Then Laura spots a Native American baby with hair quote as black as a crow.

Those quote black.

Eyes looked deep into Laura's eyes, and she looked deep down into the blackness of that little baby's eyes, and she wanted that one little baby.

End quote. Laura says to Paw, quote, Paw, get me that little Indian baby. I want it. I want it, she begged. End quote.

Paw, to his credit or to Laura's, decades later, tells Laura quote sternly to hush.

It's one of the few moments in the series. Pa gets stern with Laura.

Caroline Fraser believes this scene is a direct memory of Laura's who, as we talked about in an earlier episode, would have been just three years old at this time. When I said earlier that nothing had stood out to me as strange in the Little House Books, this scene is the exception. Even as a child, I found Laura's desire to acquire a Native American infant absolutely bizarre. I wasn't the only one. It stuck out to journalist Mariene O'Connor, who also loved the books growing up.

And that moment also is like kind of horrifying because she wants this like just like, PA, go get me. That is my toy. I want it more than you know. And she didn't even beg for dolls that hard. But then she also in that same passage, I believe, describes how she also wishes that she was one of those children or she wants to own, and that sort of bizarre. The way that she sort of processes those feelings is layered, maybe I don't know, and horrified.

It was emblazoned on my childhood brain also, And what I clearly remember is that I desperately wanted to know what the Native American baby was seeing. I wanted to know what the infant traveling with their mother alongside a pony into the unknown saw when they looked at Laura.

We've included links.

With more information on these histories in our show notes, and we encourage you to learn more about these stories. We do know that while Laura did some research, she didn't seem too interested in finding out that much more. Here's Lizzie Skurnick, writer and professor of children's literature at NYU.

What we do know is that she personally, as a human was not very interested in getting the larger story and never went beyond the context she was personally taught, which is just not true of everybody that's her age.

Not once does Laura ever attempt to imagine someone else's impression of her. Never once does she wonder how she might appear and by extension, offer the same fullness of experience to anyone else that she gives to her own family.

Books like Little House in the Prairie that have these like naked Indians who can't speak English, then we come to think of Native peoples as savage, primitive people. We were miseducated. That's not the truth.

Here's doctor de wie Reese. Doctor Rees runs a website called American Indians and Children's Literature.

We looked different, we lived different, but we're not less human. We had and have societies, and ordered societies, have leaders, and that's what we need to know about who we were before Europeans came to our homelands.

Any awareness of that complexity or history is completely absent from the Little House books. As I said, Little House on the Prairie of the book didn't shock me when I went back to reread it for this podcast.

I knew what was there.

I was familiar with the arguments for and against it. What did surprise me was the extent to which the problems of Laura are not limited to just this one book.

We're going to get to that after the break.

Let's stick with the book Little House on the Prairie for just a little while longer. In addition to the ways Native Americans were depicted, there's also the issue of who was left out almost entirely.

This is our dedication to doctor Oh.

He's on the census in there, He's right above the ingles, So that's really cool.

He is buried in Independence in the White Cemetery, which was a big deal back there.

That's Ronda again from the Little House Museum outside of Independence, Kansas, and she's showing us a display at the museum about a man called doctor Tan. Three quarters of the way through the book, the Ingles family comes down with malaria, then called agu In the midst of their illness, a black doctor arrives. Quote Laura could not take her eyes off Doc Tan. He was so very black. She would have been afraid of him if she hadn't liked him

And by the way, what's fascinating is in the books he just sort of appears for a second.

This is Lizzie Skarnick again.

He delivered Carrie.

He was the person who delivered carry He was their family doctor. And also he was in Oklahoma Territory. I think he finally settled in Oklahoma Territory and that's where his house was.

But he was very successful.

He treated the o sage, he treated the white people, he treated anybody else, and he was beloved and very famous and ended his life very wealthy because he actually owned the land he was on.

He owned the oil rights.

In the book, Doc Tan appears as a side character, which at the time is likely how Laura experienced him she was a kid. But here's what really stands out to me in this chapter. At the very end of it, Laura steps out of the narrative and takes the time to explain to the reader that agu was later discovered

My dad was Jewish, my mother was black.

I had been exposed all my life to white people talking about black people, and to me, this was another way to see white people's views of people who.

Were not white.

So even then I was like I remember being glad to see Doc Tann. I remember being glad to see a person in the books who was a good person and a black person. But also when I learned more about him, because my own mother's family are people from all black towns in Oklahoma Territory, from a town called Bully, So when I learned more about that, I did feel like and I didn't blame this on Lora Angos wild

They're just a facet.

Of what's an enormous world, and it's just the part of the story that the white person chows to tell that was interesting to them. And then I always do wonder you think back on it, and I'm like, you know, does Laura remember who delivered baby Carrie? You know, did Rose Wilder Lane try to hide it?

We don't know for certain what Rose or Laura decided to hide or why, but we do know there were plenty of black homesteaders on the prairie at the same time as the Ingles.

Here's historian Flannery Burke.

Black farmers were there, you know, for all the parts of the story, the hard winters, the family togetherness, the sleigh rides, the frustrated relationship with major corporations like the railroad, but they don't often ter common conversation.

And black homesteaders had their own reasons for migrating west.

Here's Lizzie Skernick again.

It was the same reason my great grandparents went to is the same reason anyone went to the territories. But I think black people also went because it was this idea of, well, there's not going to be slavery, and we can sort of form our own communities here.

We have a little more space, and hopefully there's not.

So many white people that can round us up and kill us.

Get the more space from this issue at this juncture.

You know.

And also, like everyone's a pioneer. People in general like to be pioneers of all types. It's just we only tell one pioneer story.

Lauren Rose stuck to that one pioneer story throughout the entire Little House series. And as I said earlier, when I went back to reread the entire series, I realized there were a lot more problems. Some stand right out, like the chapter titled Indian Warning at the beginning of the Long Winter, when Pa encounters an elderly Native American band who predicts the coming winter. This scene is fictional,

Yeah, Charlie's now almost six, and there are some.

Things that definitely stand out to him.

He knows things. He knows things that I didn't know as a kid, and he points them out. The things that really stood out were Ma's intense reactions to the Native Americans, who they call Indians in the book, and he corrected the book. He said they should be called Native Americans, and I said, good job, public school system of Philadelphia. But he said, He's like, I just don't

I love that Charlie spotted all that. It does speak well of the.

Culture kids are growing up and now, because when I was a kid, none of this flagged to me, except that final scene, which I thought was absolutely bizarre. I have to say when I read the rest of the books, because Little House in the Prairie of the book is the one that gets the most attention.

It has the most overt racism.

And so when I went back to reread the rest of the books, that's where I was like, wait a second, we're.

Going to continue the series, and so could you tell me some more red flags that I have yet to encounter.

The phrase you'll be as brown as an Indian is repeatedly aimed at Laura when she's not wearing her bonnet, including it being the final thing her family says to her when she leaves home.

To marry Almonzo, and.

It's greeted as this like phrase of affection and things like on the banks of Plum Creek, Laura writes it, they're now safe from wolves and Indians. Like there's this sort of persistent blending of Native Americans and as animals, as animals, as animals, wildlife. It happens more than once. It's not just that one phrase. There's also the phrase I'm free white and American that.

Repeatedly comes up. I mean, on the one hand.

That's the truth, right, Like, there is a truth to that, but that truth is not what's being conveyed when that phrase is used in these books. That phrase is being used as like manifest destiny. I guess, a phrase of total entitlement.

A phrase of entitlement instead of a checking of privilege exactly.

Like there's no there's no sort of like I'm free white in American and therefore I can do what I want unlike everyone else that currently is in this country. It's really just like it is a total entitlement, Like how dare you.

I'm free white and American, so I deserve yep.

You can't touch me.

And then this really stood out to me I'd never noticed this before.

At the beginning of The Long Winter, Laura wants to.

Go help Paw in the field to harvest, and we're told that Ma doesn't like to see women working in the field.

Quote only foreigners did.

That Ma and her girls were American above doing men's work, and that when I read that, read that a couple times. And part of the reason I think it never stood out to me before is because by that point in the series, we're so accustomed to dismissing Ma's racist views as like, not as problematic, but as like annoying because they're just keeping Laura from doing what she wants. So it is never like, oh, this is a problem that Mas says this because it's racist, it was a problem.

And just thinking like, oh wow.

And then of course there's the entire chapter in Littletown on the Prairie where there's a big blackface scene.

Right, I have not gotten to that yet.

And what I'm thinking, as you're going through all of this is how do I talk to Charlie about these things and about these issues because I think it could be used as a way to teach history, to say these our views that some people did have, this is what we believe now, and as a way to show him that sentiments evolve, right.

Yes, I mean, I can tell you as a kid, I didn't know what blackface meant. And in the chapter, I remember it as Pa putting shoe polish on his face, and I just thought it was like a Halloween costume to disguise himself, and Ma's big concern is that he might have shaved his beard. Rose inserted this scene. This never happened. So Rose intentionally inserted a blackface scene in littletown on the Prairie that Laura.

Was okay with. That's not actually a reflection of.

What actually happened, although it is absolutely a reflection of the kind of entertainment that was happening, both at that time and at the time the books were being written in the thirties. But all of this, of course, without any context for Glenna's age eight, is just a scene in which we get to see Pau having fun and Laura enjoying it in the town, having a party. And when I went back and reread that chapter, it's breathtaking in the worst possible way, and a lot of discussions

It's endemic to the whole series, is what you're.

Saying, woven in in a way that I think reflects the degree to which it's woven in our storytelling. Like it's just sometimes when we talk about Laura, it's like she's a problem, and in understanding the degree to which it is woven throughout the books, you're like, it's all a problem.

This is not just a problem of Laura.

Remember that parent who wrote to complain about the opening pages of Little House. Here's the part of editor Ursula Nordstrum's response that stood out the most to me.

No one here the words read as they did. It seems unbelievable to me that you are the only person who has picked them up and written to us about them in the twenty years since the book was published.

In all those years, no one, including the people who had published the book, had spotted the problem.

But perhaps it's.

Not that surprising no one had noticed when you consider the problem is everywhere.

You know, blackface is entertainment, right, that was always the problem that remains the problem.

This is Lizzie Skarnick again that.

People are like, ah, he loves these Confederate statues.

We grew up with them.

It creates a psychological hurdle that many people cannot get over clearly. And I think Laura fans that it's like, wow, you know, there's that Indian baby I wanted to steal.

So God's great.

And then you have this generation of.

Children who want a papoos to think of Native children as.

Dolls and not a little child. You know.

You push together this coziness with you know, the decimation of Native.

Tribes, or with you know, the.

Erasure and bigotry about black people, you know, and even the marrying off of girls who are very young, and you just have this confusing diet.

But of course that's America.

Besides the beautiful descriptions and feelings of coziness, there's something else going on in the books that discourages us from questioning any part of what we're reading or someone else, and that's Paw. We talked a lot in a previous episode about reconsidering Paw with grown up eyes, and one of those reconsiderations is under standing the role he plays as the quintessential white savior. In Little House here's Rebecca Tracter again.

Paw is presented as the most humane in the family and the person who is able to acknowledge, even in very small ways, the humanity of the people who he's displacing.

Lizzie Skernick spotted it immediately.

I was like, oh, this is another situation in which Pa, as the white guy, gets to decide which Indians are good Indians are bad Indians.

Doctor Rees notes that the so called good Indians are always the ones who help the white people.

Paw has a line where he says he tries to rationalize what a good or a bad Indian is, and the good Indian, according to Paw, is the one that rides in to stop the other Indians from attacking the little House on the prairie. So that's a good Indian, according to Paw. So what are the ones that are in the river bottoms? I guess they're bad Indians and the only good Indian is a dead Indian. Applause is to those ones, but not to the one who saved them.

This happens more than once and by the shores of Silver Lake, as the Ingles are crossing the desolate prairie. They are set upon by threatening figures and then rescued by a man named Big Jerry. Quote, everything's all right now, PA said, that's Big Jerry.

Who's Big Jerry? MA asked. He's a half breed French and Indian.

PA answered carelessly, a gambler and some say a horse thief, but a darned good fellow. Big Jerry won't let anybody waylay us.

Yes, he's a half breed.

This is Lizzie Skernick again.

So as a half breed, and what he is is he's a half breed who protects all the white people, and so his role is.

To protect Pa. Here's how Big is described. He looks like an Indian.

He was tall and big, but not one bit fat, and his thin face was brown. His straight black hair swung against his flat, high bone cheek as he rode, for he wore no hat. As a kid, I was like, great, Big Jerry is here, Everything is going to be fine. Paul likes him, and therefore I understand he's both safe and probably fun.

Of course, you love Big Jerry. He's like a hero, but he's also kind of bad.

But what's also so clear about Big Jerry is that like he exists in the white world, you know, and he's almost like pause representative in the camp, you know, pause, not comfortable in like civilization.

You know.

He doesn't really like his job there, so he sort of needs a heavy And that's Big Jerry.

And his snow white horse wore no saddle nor bridle. The horse was free. He could go wherever he wanted to go, and he wanted to go with Big Jerry wherever Big Jerry wanted to ride.

The horse and the man moved together as if they were one animal.

As I said earlier, something else that stood out to me on this reread is that Laura and or Rose have a habit of aligning Native Americans with animals. I say or Rose because Big Jerry is a fictional creation, and of.

Course Big Jerry again like totally made up story. I mean, I think the idea is that that person did exist. None of that ever happened, nor if it happened, it happened very differently.

And I think that's what we keep coming back to that with all this context, it's easier to see that it did happen very differently for everyone whether or not they are actually included in the books. But having that context, what do we do with it? How do we go forward with Little House and Laura knowing all this? After the break, we'll talk to doctor Reese again about how she believes we should think about and teach Little House.

I think they are a good book to use in a college classroom. Get studies what we might call propaganda.

So, now that we've taken a long, hard look at what's in the Little House books, it's time to start asking how should we be interacting with them, How should we think about them, Should they be in schools at all?

And if so, how should these books be taught.

Doctor Reese believes the book should be approached academically.

I think they are a good book to use in a college classroom. Get studies what we might call propaganda or our critical media studies, where you're looking very carefully at perspective point of view, indoctrination.

Let's talk about propaganda for a minute.

Here's how the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines the word propaganda. The spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purposes of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.

It is an indoctrination because it is asking us to identify with a people that came onto native homelands and took their lands and killed their families. But a lot of Americans need that narrative in order not to feel negatively about their own family histories here and.

What they have today.

We've talked about the ways that the Little Housebooks have some complicated politics baked into them, from the Fourth of July speeches to the heroic white settler head West fulfilling some sort of divine mandate. And then there's Rose's connection to libertarian ideology, and there is no question that the libertarian fantasy Rose tried to weave through the Little Housebooks falls under the heading of propaganda. We also know from the first episode that The Long Winter was used as

When a book.

Wins awards or is love, it is because of the writing. In some way, it is beckoning to the reader. And so when you try to ask someone to start reading the book and then stop and think critically about that character, you're doing this twist on their heart, their head, their emotions, all of that. If your goal is to understand racism, you don't need to do it using a book like this, where you're asking kids to read it from cover to cover.

Chapter two, Doctor Rees believes it's impossible to give these books to children and expect them to understand the context, even if it is provided.

I think the harm is too great because it's not just that harm, it's the context of larger, more widespread harms. So it's just one more saying that Native children have to endure, and it's one more thing that non Native children go through that affirms those mistaken ideas that they get just as a matter of life.

In the United States.

And why can't Native kids have stories that affirm them like other people do, instead of having to deal with that story in their classroom.

Doctories advocates for Little House only having a place in the college level classroom, which made us curious, what does it look like when Little House is used in this manner?

What is it like to encounter.

Little House for the first time as a grown person, particularly for people from younger generations who have grown up with a lot more resources and viewpoints than many of us did. It turns out I would soon get an answer to this question. While we were in the early stages of making this podcast, I woke up one morning to a series of messages on my phone from various friends and even just acquaintances. They were all sending me

How old are you now?

I'm teaching a class and none of the students have heard of these titles, much less read them. I'm trying to see when these books fell out of favor.

So I just came home and threw up on Twitter, like did you read these books? And if so, when, because I kind of wanted to see maybe when they stopped being popular.

That's doctor Julia H.

Lee, professor of Asian American Studies at You See Irvine. She sent that tweet out not expecting such a huge response.

I have a very small, small, small footprint on Twitter, but I was shocked at the number of responses I got. And I'm still getting responses almost two months later, So over four thousand people responding I read the books when I was this age. I never read the books, and so it was just really really interesting to see how many people wanted to talk about the books and their experience reading them.

On the one hand, the amount of responses Doctor Lee received definitely proved the books are still as popular as ever. On the other hand, the reaction was mixed. I would say that more.

People were like, I love them and I've passed them on to my children, but there were I think a significant number of people who said, I read the books, but I'm not planning on passing them on to my own children or to young people in my life, because I realized now how problematic they are.

Doctor Lee had sent out this tweet in the first place because of an experience she had had in her classroom.

I'm currently teaching a class that you see I called the Asian American West, and one of the novels that we're reading is by Linda Sue Park and it's called Prairie Lotus and it's a Asian American retelling of Little House on the Prairie.

As part of the preparation, Doctor Lee assigned Little House on the Prairie the book.

And before we started talking about Little House, I always ask my students this, how many of you've read this book before?

And none of the students.

Raise their hand, which is quite common, but they kind of looked at me funny. While I was asking this, and I said, how many of you've heard of this book before? And none of them had, none of them. But I was really taken aback because these books have been huge in my own childhood, and I had assumed that the popularity still lingered.

Once her students did read the book, they definitely had thoughts.

I think it was really interesting to see it through the eyes of my students, because they had a lot to say about all.

You know, it was a little bit of.

I can't believe they let children read this, And their analysis was really spot on, you know. They talked about how not only the kind of representation of Native Americans and the kind of the hateful rhetoric directed towards them, but also the book's representation of gender and patriarchy and kind of all of those things. And so I don't think any of them would say, oh, yeah, this is a okay I put on reading to my own children or anything like that.

Quite quite opposite.

This got us curious had the Little House Books and all their many problems, finally lost their broad appeal to younger generations. In December, we went to a college classroom where the Little House Books were being taught. We wanted to try and dig deeper into this question. Lizzie Skirnik allowed us to participate in her class at NYU on historical fiction writing. The students had been assigned Little House in the Big Wood and Little House on the Prairie.

I wasn't ever read these books when I was a child, and I'm so happy that my mom decided not to do that for me.

It was kind of exciting to see what all the hype was about. But then it turns out there's no hype.

I think that so many kids that idolized and romanticized this, why did they want to do?

Nothing?

Like?

Why did they want to put on aprons?

When the students moved deeper into their analysis of the books, their thinking was very in line with everything we've been talking about in the last six episodes, and the parts they found the most disturbing could definitely be categorized as propaganda.

I was thinking, while reading this, what haven't they written? What histories haven't been written while reading this? And what have we been like glazy over what other side stories were happening. And I think as a child, I wouldn't have liked this because I would think where am I in this? And that's why I didn't enjoy it as much.

I don't understand like why America would romanticize this period after these books, because everything in the books it just feels so traumatic and I don't know it.

It's just so messed up.

I did interact with these as a kid, and I wasn't into it. I was like I was kind of warned, not like not allowed to, but kind of like warned against reading them by my mom because she was like the racist straight up. And I was like a little kid, like Okay, I'll take a look for myself. And like you said, like it's it's it's hard to romanticize it because it's like I'm not going to romanticize being a settler.

I also think like it's like very concerning that the global audience is influenced by this text of what American history is or what the ideals of American self sufficiency were and then be romanticized in this book series like by a Little Girl is just sort of like it's like the maple syrup on America.

I was still thinking about doctor Reese's argument that the Little House books should not be read to children in classrooms. So I asked these students what they thought. Would these be books you would give or suggest being read by small kids, not like you have to.

Like there is sort of in my family there was like a this is like required reading to be a little kid.

But like it might not. I won't ban it from a bookshelf, ye like, but not be like you must. I would never give it to my child.

I feel like it's just much more important at this point to have more diversity, Like at this point, it's like I'd rather that that the focus be on reversing a lot of the harm that children's books have done.

These days, kids have a lot of options when it comes to what they want to read, even when it comes to pioneer stories. Doctor Julia Lee remarked on how much things have changed since she was a kid.

Children's literature and young adult literature is so much richer now, Like there's so many Like when we were kids, we were reading probably Little House on the Prairie. We read Ramona quimb Like you know, it was very like everybody was kind of reading the same thing, and now I feel like there's just so much representation that was not my experience reading as a child. I never expected to read about Asian people, Korean folks, anything like that.

So I wasn't even looking. I didn't even know to look for it.

Like I just accepted like this was this was what.

These were the types of characters that people read about.

Maybe we're in a time where there's so many options for kids, so many wonderful ways for them to see themselves in writing and on screen. The Little House is no longer necessy. This reminded me of something we had heard in Just Met South Dakota when we talked to the kids participating in the pageant there.

I've actually never read the books.

No.

I worked at the Memorial Society for a while and I had to read all the books, and did you I mean, not my genre, but as a general book, it's good.

Fantasy, gay roman.

When it comes to children's books series that offer alternate representation, Louise Erdrich's Birch Bark House series is perhaps the most well known, but we're going to list others. In the notes to this episode, Doctor Reese also had some suggestions.

Right now, I'm very keen, very high on Forever Cousins.

It's a new picture book.

And it's about these two little girls their cousins. They actually live in the San Francisco Bay area, but why are they there? And so in the authorish notes, the author tells it about one of the government programs that ask Native people to leave their.

Homelands in seat up a life in a major city. And so San Francisco has a huge Native community, and so these little girls are part of that. So I'd like people to just use books by Native writers, because the author's notes that are in there that give context to what this story is about are vital to undoing or filling in what teachers did not get when they were in school.

So if we have all these other options, why does Little House continue to have such appeal? In part, it's for the reasons we've discussed. The coziness and the familiar mythology are comforting to a lot of people.

But we also have to recognize that the legacy of finding.

Comfort in these stories has resulted in an enormous cultural footprint that is very difficult to extricate from because it is so comfortable. In the next few episodes, we're taking a look at the enormity of that cultural imprint.

Without question.

One of the reasons Little House is so ingrained in our culture is that somewhere in the world right now you can turn on a television and watch the nineteen seventies TV show that was based on the books. Would the books even still be around if it weren't for that iconic show? Do Laura and Rose owe their legacy to the vision of one man and his rippling pecks and shiny thick hair.

Enter Michael Landon.

For all of Rose's dreams of Little House as a commercial for libertarian fantasy, even Rose could not have dreamed up the Little House fantasy that emerged only a few short years after her death. Next week on Wylder, We're Going to Hollywood. Wilder is written and hosted by me Glennis McNichol. Our story editors are Joe Piazza and Emily Meroanoff. Our senior producer is Emily Meroanof. Our producers are Mary Doo, Shina Ozaki, and Jessica Crinchich. Our associate producer is Lauren Phillip.

It actually helps us out quite a lot.

Thanks to Ronda in the Little House on the Prairie Museum Outside of Independence, Kansas. Special thanks to Lizzie Skernick and her wonderful class for letting us join their discussion and sharing their.

Thoughts with us.

And thanks as always to doctor de Wi Reese who was so generous with her time in scholarship. Thank you as always to CDM Studios. Listen extensive resources in our show notes on all the topics we've discussed in this episode, as well as reading options for the children in your life. You can also find our contact and go there if you want to write to us with your own thoughts

Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.