Biography,  Chapter Books

Defending Laura

The renaming of the “Laura Ingalls Wilder Award” as the “Children’s Literature Legacy Award” seems shockingly misguided. It coincides with my reading of Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser, a biography of Wilder that places her life in a historical context, and I’ve been re-listening to the audiobook version of Little House on the Prairie as a supplement. It leaves me wondering if the powers behind the name change have even read the book.

For example, in this article, we’re told disapprovingly that

In the 1935 book “Little House on the Prairie,” for example, multiple characters espoused versions of the view that “the only good Indian was a dead Indian.” In one scene, a character describes Native Americans as “wild animals” undeserving of the land they lived on.

Does it matter at all that the “multiple characters” who express these views consist of one couple, the Scotts, whose racist attitudes are critiqued in the story by Charles Ingalls’s respect for the Indians? The narrator tells us explicitly at one point that unlike Mr. Scott, Pa Ingalls doesn’t believe that the only good Indian is a dead Indian.

More troublesome is the fact that the Ingalls family are squatting on an Indian reservation in the story, harboring the view that the government will move the Indians on. Pa assures the young Laura that this is always what happens in the West: when the white settlers come, the natives have to go. There is an unmistakable racism in this attitude of white entitlement, but it is a historic fact. Despite his fundamental respect for the Osages and his sense of kinship with their love for freedom and desire to live independently off the land, Charles Ingalls has absorbed the systemic racism of his time and place.

Similarly, Caroline Ingalls’s fear of the natives reflects her time. Her fear is not misplaced; just five years before Laura was born, the “Minnesota massacre” to which Mrs. Scott refers in the story had occurred, a retaliatory strike by natives in New Ulm, Minnesota that exhibited horrific brutality: ambushing, scalping, shooting and beheading of unsuspecting settlers — mothers, fathers and children. The real enemy, of both the Indians and the settlers, was the U.S. government, which had made and failed to honor agreement after agreement with the natives. As a result the situation was a powder keg.

All of this makes the story more valuable as an honest portrayal of a period in history. It has the unmistakable complexity of a true account of experience. On the one hand, racism is a part of the landscape of the story through the Ingalls family’s situation and sense of entitlement. On the other hand, to the extent that this racism is made apparent to them, we see both Charles Ingalls and Laura challenging racist notions and exhibiting respect and fascination with the Osages’ unique culture and nobility.

This kind of complexity is repeated later, in Little Town on the Prairie, when we see Pa and other townsmen in a minstrel show with “five black-faced men in raggedy-taggedy uniforms,” portraying a racial stereotype of African Americans. The book was published in 1941, and again it represents a faithful retelling of an incident with its original racist attitudes intact. But the scene doesn’t represent an endorsement of these attitudes. The Ingalls family’s allegiance in the Civil War, which takes place during their stay in Kansas in Little House on the Prairie, is never expressed, but we know that in the story Laura genuinely likes Dr. Tan. The only African American depicted, Dr. Tan is a doctor who saves her and her family’s lives by administering quinine when they have malaria. “I had never seen a colored man before,” the young Laura tells us honestly. But she also tells us how much she likes him, and the story’s action leaves no doubt that the family owe their lives to him and his capable medical care.

Interestingly, in Prairie Fires, Fraser recounts an episode in 1921 when Laura, processing an application in the Mansfield  National Farm Loan Association, bucked regional prejudice in her home in Mansfield, MO by shaking hands with a “colored member” applying for a federal farm loan. Fraser writes,

She made a joke of it to [Rose Wilder] Lane, referring to rumors that one of President Warren G. Harding’s great-grandmothers was African American: “If we have him for president, why not treat the colored brother kindly?”

This episode 20 years prior to the publication of Little Town on the Prairie indicates that while she was not a crusader for racial equality, Wilder didn’t accept her region’s racist assumptions about people. It’s not credible to accuse her of advancing a racist agenda in Little Town, however much the townspeople’s racial insensitivity may make us cringe today. Quite possibly, it made her cringe too. This is part of coming to terms with our past, and moving beyond it: facing squarely the ways otherwise admirable and likable people reflected racism without even realizing it.

This kind of complexity is a gift to us, part of the reason we read. It enables us to see history, dark parts included, from the perspective of the people who lived it, without demonizing or caricaturing them. Isn’t this what we need today? We are told so often of the institutional racism that exists in American society, but it is in such polarizing terms it doesn’t allow us to see it as it is: strands of thought woven throughout a collective unconscious. Works like the Little House books, or like the darker and more complicated Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, permit us the critical distance we need to confront how essentially trustworthy, independent thinkers like Charles Ingalls or Huck Finn can begin to wrestle against racism — even though at some level unknown to them they exhibit it within themselves.

I think renaming the award is a great mistake. It reflects a vast oversimplification of our cultural inheritance and a stunning demeaning of children, whose natural sense of justice and basic honesty make them far readier to grapple with these matters than the over zealous academics who would employ Orwell’s incinerator — the “memory hole” into which the news of yesterday is thrown in 1984 — to obliterate, rather than understand, the past.

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