(RNN) – In a March Washington Post piece, Caroline Fraser, a biographer of “Little House on the Prairie” author Laura Ingalls Wilder, wrote that “her work and its reception are more complicated than we may once have believed, shedding light on the myths that white Americans have woven about the past.”
Fraser was responding to news that the American Library Service to Children (part of the American Library Association) was considering removing Wilder’s name from a children’s literature award. This weekend, it did that, recasting the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award as the Children’s Literature Legacy Award.
Wilder’s vivid depictions of 1800s settler life made for a beloved children’s book and an almost equally beloved TV series that aired for nearly a decade in the '70s.
It was also, as a statement about the award change from the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy & Research Association acknowledged, “encumbered with the perspectives of racism that were representative of her time and place.”
In changing the award’s name, the library association attempted to navigate this tension.
“Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books have been and will continue to be deeply meaningful to many readers,” the presidents of the ALSC and ALA, Nina Lindsay and Jim Neal, said in a joint statement on Monday. However, “her works reflect dated cultural attitudes toward Indigenous people and people of color that contradict modern acceptance, celebration, and understanding of diverse communities.”
The associations stressed that the action “should not be viewed as an attempt to censor, limit, or deter access to Wilder’s books and materials” or “a call for readers to change their personal relationship with or feelings about Wilder’s books.”
Rather, they described it simply as “an effort to align the award’s title with ALSC’s core values.”
Dr. Debbie Reese, an advocate of the change and founder of American Indians in Children’s Literature, called the move a “significant and historic moment,” but noted that “the backlash to the change is already evident.”
A number of commentators disagreed with the change, with one, history and economics author Lori Ann LaRocco, saying Wilder “inspired me to be an author and to be fearless.”
And the Wilder historical association argued her legacy "also includes overwhelmingly positive contributions to children's literature that have touched generations past and will reach into the future."
Wilder’s blunt depictions of settler bigotry toward Native Americans has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. Most notably, the repeated injection of the racist adage, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” has been sharply criticized.
But there was also pushback within the text. When one character, Mr. Scott, says it, Wilder wrote, “Pa said he didn’t know about that. He figured the Indians would be as peaceable as anybody else if they were let alone.”
The full body of Wilder’s work in the end convinced the ALSC to make its decision, though.
Back in February, when the organization announced in a blog post it was reconsidering the award, its president Lindsay wrote Wilder’s legacy, “continues to be a focus of scholarship and literary analysis, which often brings to light anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments in her work” and that it “may no longer be consistent with the intention of the award named for her.”
Fraser, the Wilder biographer, wrote in her Post piece that the award’s name itself was ultimately secondary to the continued value in assessing her work.
“Whether we love Wilder or hate her, we should know her,” she wrote. “For decades, her legacy has been awash in sentimentality, but every American … should learn the harsh history behind her work.
“Vividly, unforgettably, it still tells truths about white settlement, homesteading and the violent appropriation of Indian land and culture.”
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