Unfortunately, The Laura Ingalls Wilder Award has been renamed the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. In 2018, The Association for Library Service to Children voted to remove her name because of “anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments in her work.” Hardly a nuanced view. I hope her name will be restored. But let’s review the evidence.
On August 18, 1862, several bands of Dakota Indians attacked white settlements in southwest Minnesota, killing hundreds and displacing thousands in what came to be known to settlers as the “Minnesota Massacre.” The Indians were starving; the influx of settlers meant less game and fewer crops. The conflict ended in December of that year, after many deaths on both sides and a mass execution of 38 Indians. That’s some of the history behind Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, but neither she nor her family knew much of it—apart from their fears of another massacre. The book opens with Pa telling the girls they’re going to a place with “no people, only Indians.” In 1952, someone pointed out the racism in the line and Wilder fixed it, changing the words to “no settlers, only Indians,” saying of course she hadn’t meant to say Indians weren’t people. She meant, I should think obviously, “there were no folks who looked like us—we’d be the only ones of our own ilk.” A lonely position, especially when identity is primarily defined by ethnicity (Robin Di Angelo, Ibram X. Kendi, wake up! We’d come so far from that limited position when you stepped in.)
By 1868, Laura’s family became part of a group of settlers illegally moving into Osage territory in hopes of the government ruling in their favor against the Indians. Settlers like Pa, spurred on by manifest destiny, the 19th belief that America was destined to spread westward across the continent, were hoping the government would not honor its treaty with the Osage. They had reason to hope. The Homestead Act of 1862, signed into law by President Lincoln, has been called a democratizing of land ownership. A small fee allowed anyone, including freed slaves, to put in a claim for 160 acres of land. But by 1868, the U.S. government, hobbled by civil war expenses, hadn’t paid the Osage Indians what was owed from a treaty dating back to 1825. Naturally, the Osage resented Pa erecting a cabin on their land, hunting game on their land, planting crops on their land. They came by demanding food and taking whatever they wanted; Ma, terrified, gave it to them. To the children and to Ma, they looked scary in their near-naked state, smelling to high heaven in skunk-skin loincloths.
Like their close neighbor Mrs. Scott, Laura’s Ma had read in local newspapers about the Minnesota Massacre. It’s not surprising Mrs. Scott felt as she did—saying, “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” The only good murderer was a dead murderer—that’s what she meant. As she says, “My Pa and brothers went out with the rest of the settlers, and stopped them only fifteen miles west of us.”
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