Laura Ingalls Wilder unapproved!!

[IrmaFayLear]

www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/24/laura-ingalls-wilders-name-removed-from-book-award-over-racial-concerns

I know the books contain "unenlightened" views, but this book was of the time. If all racist views and comments are deleted from literature/history, then how are people supposed to know they ever existed?

The Ingalls family were pioneers - or settlers if you will. They were afraid - for genuine reasons - of "red Indians". Were the Native Americans in the right? 100%.

I don't want half-witted knee-jerk censorship. Frankly just about everything is going to have to be "unapproved" if we go down this road. The past is another country, not a country that didn't exist.

Is the link to the wrong article? Because the one in the OP just says that a literary award has decided to change it's name. Can yuh link to the right article, please?

I loved her books as a kid; I still remember the accounts of making maple sugar in the Big Woods, of eating bear, of the badger that "saved" Laura by scaring her away from the dangerous swimming hole, of Pa getting lost in a snowstorm on the way back from town and surviving by digging a snow cave and eating all the Christmas candy, of mean Nellie Olsen, and having to twist straw into solid "logs" to burn during the Long Winter......

I must admit, when I heard the books had negative portrayals of black people, I thought "What? The first black person they met was the doctor who treated their malaria!", but I had forgotten about the blacking up incident .

But I still think it's right to remove her name from the prize. To lionize an author to such an extent is kind of like saying "Well, your account of the past is the definitive and valid one". Until relatively recently, the Brave Pioneers Triumphing Over the Savages was the dominant myth of those times, and it's definitely past time to promote accounts of that period from different POVs.

Given they were very low on food for a fair amount of time, and that Charles often had to leave home to find work, the number of children seem fine. Anyway, apart from omitting the death of her brother, the number of children is factual. Are you saying it isn’t?

Yes factual. I read the latest biography I think it was last year and it was reviewed in the Financial Times. I think I still have a copy.
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"Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder is a subtle, intelligent and quietly explosive study not just of a woman whose Little House books have sold more than 60m copies in 45 languages, but of a very particular way of life, the life of the American pioneer. Looking deeply at the circumstances of the small farmers of the Great Plains, it examines how intricately connected their existence was to popular ideas about the American character. Prairie Fires is also an investigation of the practice of writing: of myth-making versus truth-telling, of the art of consolation, and of a strange sort of hair-raising, unboundaried, literary interdependence that developed in later life between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her writer daughter Rose Wilder Lane."

Not all women were endlessly pregnant. I have sone internal irregularities, as did my mother and grandmother. They (obviously) didn't make us infertile but do make conception harder if you don't know how to accomodate them (which I did and they didnt). My gran had 1 child (after 14 years of trying), my mum had 2 pregnancies over 10 years of trying.

andthen, I've read Bury My Heart, yes. But I wonder if you're conflating people discussing the books with people excusing the attitudes in them? I think they are books worth reading. But that is partly because it matters to say, look, racists can look entirely sympathetic and nice. And so, incidentally, can misogynists. I remember reading the line 'Ma and her girls were Americans, above doing men's work' and suddenly realising how very twisted that viewpoint was, and how it was both fostering a weird kind of nationalism and keeping Laura away from the kind of work she actually enjoyed doing.

In my view, part of what books do is to show you how enticing or normalised bigotry can be. There's no point just saying 'in the past people were horrible' - that gives you no visceral understanding of what it might be like. In the real world, people who're racist aren't neatly distinguished from everyone else by their horns and tails or their horrible meanness. They often seem pretty much ok, right up until you realise they're saying something awful. And that's a job these books do, is to make you see that.

Also, the numbers of children really aren't unusual. To have a family of 5 with one neonatal death - no, normal. That's not to say others didn't have more, but if you look at census records, this is a perfectly unremarkable family size for the time.

Keep in mind that many Indigenous cultures maintain their stories in oral traditions. (Some Indigenous groups did not have written languages until European contact. They had only a spoken language.) The oral communication was as much a part of the stories and traditions as the actual words and plots. This could mean that there are fewer written records simply because that wasn't the format used for communication. (Sadly it is also possible, even likely, that what written records existed may have been destroyed.)

Every record will be destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture will be repainted, every statue and street building renamed, every date altered. And the process will increase day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the left is always right

Native American treatment was every bit as bad as a certain event that happened in Europe between 1936-45 beginning with the letter H.

The United States Government and previous to that colonial powers practiced extreme of exterminating the local population concentration camps death marches, slaughtering entire villages the only difference is they did not have the technology to create gas chambers.

The people saying were the natives 100% in the right would NEVER EVER dream of asking were the Jewish victims 100% in the right. The genocide that occured in the unitied states was obsence and romanticized in movies with the "cowboys" being the good guys when in fact the cowboys were the unitied states verson of the bloody Nazi's.

At a school my children went to they routinely played cowboy vs Indians when my children are 1/4 Apache and when i went in too complain they didn't see what was wrong and when i asked would they let children play Nazi's Vs Jew's they said of course not and i asked then why is portraying one genocide alright while the another is not?

My dd really enjoyed reading these books. She reads very widely and she has always been able to understand classic books in the context they were written in. In fact reading books that were written at times when attitudes to certain things (the role of women in society, etc) were different has really helped her to understand how the world has changed, etc.

I cannot believe that people are trying to still make excuses for racists just because they wrote books for children.

Laura was a child when her parents illegally settled on the Indian territory so can't be held responsible. Her mother does but I do wonder how much that reflects Laura's difficult relationship with her mother as an adult and so her mother becomes the voice of racism. The description of the Indians leaving their land is very powerful and we are left in no doubt that the government is not treating them well.

This is the sort of thread title that really plays into the hands of the “It’s political correctness gone mad” brigade. Incredibly annoying. OP - can you ask MNHQ to edit it?

I haven't seen many people excusing 1800s attitudes (or 1900s if that is when the books were written ) particularly on this thread. Most of us know that the damage done to the native americans was huge and awful. That does not mean they were saints themselves either of course.

I do thikn the thread title is misleading as no one is "black" listing the books.

The books aren't being blacklisted, that's a bit extreme. They're changing the name of the award.

As someone who grew up reading the books, and as someone with First Nations heritage, I can see both sides to this.

The books are amazing, and I LOVED them, but "Little House on the Prairie" specifically, does present a very stereotypical view of Native Americans and that time period, and if you are awarding authors for their lasting contributions to "inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness", than I'm sorry, I see why they changed the name.

I cannot believe that people are trying to still make excuses for racists just because they wrote books for children.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to call LIW a racist. It even says in the article that she edited some of her more controversial sentences later in life.

In fact, I don't think this is about HER as a person at all, but rather her understandably childish depiction of the Indian Wars and the events of the time.

I’m reading Little House on the Prairie to dd atm. When Ma makes comments about the Indians, I use that as an opportunity to talk to dd about racism and colonisation. When they make comments about how little girls should behave we talk about what that show about how girls were socialised. Mainly I’m reading the books to her to point out how little people used to have and also to try to get her interested in history.

That probably what most of us have always done Zinn and indeed Laura (and her daughter who worked on the books with her) both probably felt those 1800s attitudes were wrong of wives obeying their husbands, women not doing heavy farm work all of which Laura rejected which is why little girls have always loved the books - for their rejection of those attitudes, not their acceptance of them., It certainly comes over very strongly in the books. Laura is the tom boy hero who gets an education and a teaching career (at least to start with)

OP here. I have asked my thread title to be amended. I wrote it quickly yesterday when I had just spied the Guardian article.

Regarding size of family, I'm sure Ma and Pa would have liked some sons in addition to the girls, simply because Pa was trying to farm and needed some brawn in the future. I have read that Ma may have had diabetes which could have caused miscarriages.

And not everyone can breed effortlessly: there is a couple in the books - the Boasts - who are unable to have children and ask to adopt Laura's baby as she can easily have more (she couldn't).

@Thesearepearls the beauty of the literary canon is that’s it’s categorically not for one person to decide what has literary merit. I have an MA in children’s literature. I feel they do. But that’s my subjective opinion.

It’s not just the “red indian” aspects that carry racist tones - Pa dresses up in blackface at the town social at one point, I believe. BUT it is an important reflection on a key period of American history, whether you like the writing or not.

There wouldn't be very much to read if we could only read GCSE texts!

Mind you, bil boasts that he has only read one book in his life and that was for O Level...

Yes, good points above. (Irma, thank you for starting the thread - I think there was an Irma in the little house books by the way). from memory the earliest period Laura wrote about the 1870s when she was a very little girl. My great grandmother had 10 babies around that time (all lived to adulthood amazingly) - last one my grandfather born 1880 but in England but one sister had 6 and one just two so I suspect there were often people who were widowed or infertlie or one birth went so badly it stopped them being able to have more for life and there would be bound to be some spouses who just didn't have much sex together too for various reasons.

I'm sure Ma and Pa would have liked some sons

They had one. He died at less than a year old in between the events of "Little House on the Prairie" and "On the Banks of Plum Creek". He's not mentioned in the books.

I meant grown sons.

Actually, the television series (for all its schmaltz and faults) did deal rather movingly with the loss of the Ingalls' son. It showed how over the moon Ma and Pa were with the baby and how Laura felt sidelined.

He is mentioned in one book - it may have been the one put together by the daughte r- Last Four year or something put together from the mother's notes or one of those others. Also they probably had to pick material carefully for what was appropriate for young readers in those days I suppose and too many deaths might not have gone down too well.