Oh, Laura!

I'll begin this post by saying I read nearly all of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books as a girl, and I own them still, and I read them aloud to my children when they were little. I loved her books, especially The Long Winter, probably because it was the most tragic and scary. And because I longed to be snowed in. Please, just once in my life! Let me be snowed in!

Wilder's legacy as a children's author is now under scrutiny. The Association for Library Service to Children (part of the American Library Association) decided this year to change the name of its yearly award from The Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, to The Children's Literature Legacy Award. The new word, legacy, is significant: the organization wishes this award to reflect in both its name and its recipients a legacy into the future of excellence for young readers. They have found Wilder's books to be lacking in legacy.


I left a comment on Facebook on a friend's page about this topic and was quickly blasted by fellow homeschooling and Wilder-loving moms. So I'd like to make a few things clear first:

1. I don't advocate banning Wilder's books. I generally don't advocate banning books at all. 
2. I don't advocate removing them from libraries, schools, or homes.
3. I don't advocate tossing our history out.
4. I don't advocate pandering to every whining person who takes offense at a book, song, article, or comment.
5. I do think children need guidance as they read Wilder's books. The farther removed we become from her culture, its attitudes, and its values, the more our children in the 21st Century need assistance navigating not just the historical events, but the social nuances Wilder presents.
6. The Association has the right to remove her name. They are not selecting someone else. I feel they are making a careful correction with an award's title that's more general now, and not holding any one writer up as a paragon of literary virtue. 
7. We should read books from our past that depict our mistakes, our wrong thinking, our injustices to others, and our societal selfishness. It's good to remember how bad an aggressive, dominant white culture was in the 1800s. It's not good to present those ideas, unfiltered, to our young children who lack skills to evaluate them carefully.
8. Wilder's simplistic writing style belies its subject matter. The style is perfect for rather young children; some of the material is not. I'm not referring to the danger in the stories; children benefit from vicarious danger in stories -- danger at a safe distance. Again, I don't want mamby-pamby kids. I am more concerned about the influence on their hearts.

One of the books in question, Little House on the Prairie, in which the Ingallses move to Kansas a bit too early and encounter many Native Americans, was published in 1935 when Wilder was in her 60s. Wilder was a white writer, writing for a white audience. No one considered how Native American children might respond to depictions of their grandparents in her books, and it was not thought odd that they were not considered. "Not being considered" was the norm for minorities of all kinds during the early 20th Century.

Wilder wrote of her own time, and her expressions were not frowned upon then. She merely depicts the attitudes she recalls from her childhood. But the fact that, in the 1930s, she wrote such sharp racial material for children without batting an eye, shows how much has changed - I wonder if it was even considered "racist" then! Today, we take greater care regarding all the children who will read -- Native American children, black children, Asian children, white children. All children. Wilder did not have to bother with such consideration, and I don't hold it against her. She was simply a writer of her day - but therein lies her lack of legacy. Perhaps the harsh racial tones are more appropriate for older children reading with more discretion, or for children reading with guidance from a teacher. And perhaps no child at all should have to hear, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" repeatedly from anyone, anywhere. Just because it was said and believed, doesn't mean we all have to hear it -- especially sensitive 8 year olds with little life experience or wisdom.

As these events have rumbled past me this week I've tried to recall my own reactions to Wilder's books. She was such an observer. She watched carefully her mother's and father's opposite reactions to the Indians -- the fear, the respect, the distrust, the caution. But neither parent had a good attitude toward the people who were being driven off their lands. The Ingalls family participated in that removal as settlers, in their small way. At best, I'd have to admit that young Laura seemed confused and hesitant, to the young Mary Kathryn reader -- she liked her Pa, but she depended more on her Ma, and as a child Laura instinctively feared those Indians. Her mother's fear transferred to her. That was my impression. She found the Indian baby fascinating but foreign. And Ma's obvious disgust at the Indians' personal habits and forwardness left a life-long impression on her daughter. Laura's writer-eye was already vividly recording it all, but when it came across the page to me it seemed clear that the white people's world was vastly superior to the Indians', and Laura was glad, as her Pa was, that the whites would be able to settle this land.

That's a legacy of abuse, exploitation, violence, and cruelty that our nation is ashamed of. Is it our history? Yes. Do we study and remember it? Yes. Do we applaud it? No.

I feel that the Association made a good choice to change the name of the award, to be more cautious about attaching a single author's name to an award interested in legacy. To leave a legacy means to contribute something that will be timeless, that will outlast shifts and changes in culture, to write transcendent books unshackled by the flaws of the very times they depict. Few authors achieve this. Some people felt Wilder had done so, but she did not. 

I know many of you, my friends, will disagree, and that's okay. I don't mean to offend you, and we can disagree about a small thing like a literary award's name, without falling out. I just thought I'd present a different viewpoint, if you needed to hear one. I still love Wilder's books, and if I ever read them to my grandchildren, it will be with much greater care.