@“Cardinal Fang” That’s an interesting question, although I’m not entirely sure what point you’re trying to make in asking me.
One possibility would be not including the line. This wasn’t autobiography; she could have NOT represented her mother as extremely bigoted. Fear of Indians is one thing, and might have been unrealistic to avoid entirely, but she didn’t have to have her mother say “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” out of fidelity to history.
Alternatively, she could have had the other characters push back harder at what Ma was saying in the moment (assuming that they didn’t), and even perhaps get her to admit that she’d been speaking hyperbolically. I’m far from sure that even Ma really would have supported Pa and the other men going out and engaging in an actual massacre of Native American men, women and children.
Then, of course, there are more extreme alternatives, like having a subplot in which a positive encounter with a Native American makes Ma soften her views, but I certainly wouldn’t demand this.
If you’re writing children’s literature today, I don’t think it is too much to accept that, like swear words and extreme violence, background depictions of casual racism aren’t OK. If it is a book explicitly about racial issues, obviously you’re going to have some prejudiced characters, but otherwise that’s one place where I can accept a little bit less realism.
What I think is a somewhat more troubling question is that of how thoroughly a modern LIW would have an obligation to engage deeply with the issue of US treatment of NA at all. Is it and should it be possible for someone to write a historical novel (especially a children’s novel) set in the west in the nineteenth century that more or less deals with the logistics of pioneer life and the interpersonal struggles of one white family without really addressing the overriding ethical issue? Or can someone only write about a family of settlers during that period if they’re going to fill it with lessons in tolerance and criticism of the whole enterprise? I think there should be space for the former kind of story. I don’t - when it comes to children’s books – generally have the same feeling about a story set in the antebellum south.
There was a controversy several years ago when a children’s book about two of George Washington’s slaves baking a cake came out. I think the book wound up being withdrawn, and I was torn over it. From what I could see, the author’s goal was to represent black lives in a story that wasn’t explicitly about slavery, even if the characters were themselves enslaved. And if you want to talk about historical realism, it is certainly true that not every slave was miserable every single day, or that every slave hated his master. Yet, I cringed at the idea of a book for young children that presented a normalized picture of slavery in which a black father and daughter were happily taking pride in baking a cake for Master Washington. On the other hand, we’re then conceding that there are certain types of stories about African-American lives that simply shouldn’t be told because they don’t fit the narrative.
Again, drawing lines is hard.