mathmom, I was saying something a bit narrower, that the name of the award does not tend to direct people toward writers or illustrators for whom the award was named. Of course I would pay attention to a book that won the Newberry Award or the Caldecott Award (or would have, when my daughter was younger), but I have to admit that I have never even Googled Newberry of Caldecott. I thought they were just the benefactors?
I am with Gudmom, not having known until just now that there is/was/had been a Laura Ingalls Wilder Award.
With regard the the Newberry Award, a high schooler, seeing the Newberry “sticker” on her younger sister’s book from school, observed, “Uh oh, it’s a Newberry Award winner. That means that someone dies.”
My sisters and I played Little House in the back yard for years growing up. We dearly loved the books, especially Laura’s spunk and impulsive nature. I totally identified with her getting into trouble (more than Mary), and with the Ingalls girls being outsiders in “town” and looked down on by Nellie. I drank in the affection between Laura and Pa, and wanted to be my father’s “Half-pint”. The idea of actually living off the land captured our imaginations, and I wanted to be so authentic that I wouldn’t let plastic be used in our settler reenactments.
All three of my kids have loved the books, too. My husband had never read them and so he did the read alouds, and looked forward to entering that simpler life each night. Not easier, certainly, just so focused and stark, yet full of feeling and beauty.
This very real and meaningful world LIW created and our experiences and emotions surrounding it, are why you see a strong reaction when the honor of having an award named for her is removed. And why? We never discussed Ma’s attitudes towards Indians or minstrel shows with our kids. No need. How could one minor character’s fear (realistic for the time and circumstance), or one factual description trump a whole lifetime of anti-prejudice education and the worthy real life role models our kids have in how to treat their fellow human beings?
The question in the OP is whether Wilder is fit reading for children. In my opinion, that’s up to parents. My list of worthwhile children’s books is different today than it was 25 or 55 years ago. There are so many new books available, and the awards are useful to me as a first vetting in deciding on a purchase for children. Articles like that in the OP inspire me to do some re-reading before gifting.
My solution when giving children books like Wilder’s is to also give a counter-narrative. This link was in a homeschooling blog about teaching Little House.
I’m curious whether those who read LIW without realizing there were racist attitudes, and without having them pointed out, feel that they absorbed those racist points of view for their own. Is that a real danger? I don’t see it at all, especially with LIW’s historical fiction.
I think that individuals can love LIW’s books but also understand that the books contain some historically accurate racist views and also understand that removing LIW’s name from an award does not mean that the individuals are wrong for loving the books. That’s all.
What I’ve learned since the thread began is that, while the books celebrate American pioneer spirit, those pioneers were sometimes stealing land the U.S. government had granted to the Osage tribe. The historical fiction available to me as a child never included that version of the story. Certainly my worldview, for better or worse, was shaped by the literature available to me.
If only renaming the award really would make a difference in the stubborn forms of racism which persist in the human psyche and our culture. But since it won’t, it is troubling because it’s a step on a slippery slope towards a PC filter for children’s literature. I also do not believe literature is a source of racist attitudes in our children, even when it does depict characters with those prejudices.
I don’t think it’s a step on a slippery slope. But I’m glad we have the freedom to disagree, here and generally, in the United States. Happy Independence Day!
Didn’t The Banks of Plum Creek reveal that they had to leave their “Little House on the Prairie” because the settlement of those lands were deemed illegal? I can’t remember if I read it in the book or in one of the biographies I’ve read about her.
My D loved the little house series and read and re-read the paperback set we bought until they have literally fallen apart. She tried to make some of the food described in the books and was disappointed at how unappetizing it was after the great descriptions.
We never discussed the racism in the books but D is one of the most inclusive people I know.
I think the books are fine for all ages and can be the basis of many discussions of life then vs now, as well as shifting attitudes then vs now. Until I saw the Little Women play recently, I hadn’t thought of or remembered the terrible poverty described in the series.
I loved the books and don’t think the name change is necessary.
Despite loving the books, my impression as a young child was that Pa subjected his family to a lot of unnecessary hardship due to his wanderlust. Although the family was forced to leave Kansas, from what I remember, some of the other moves were by choice. I also thought he was abusive because of his Sunday policy of having the children sit quietly in chairs all day. There were a lot of things in the book I questioned, but read them and enjoyed them anyway.
Re the series, I liked it as a kid, but as an adult, I cringed at how Michael Landon was so full of himself. The series was more about Pa than Laura, that’s for sure.
I’m a real outlier here. I read about half of the Little House books to my kids, but I didn’t like them much at all. (I didn’t read them as a child, so I didn’t have any previous emotional connection to them. I assumed they would be great because everyone said they were great. I maybe watched the TV show a couple of times.) I didn’t think they were well written. And I absolutely noticed the racist attitudes towards Native Americans. Lots of pausing to discuss that. (I will take it on faith that readers of the books found things in them to make them question that attitude. I don’t remember that. But maybe it shows up in the later books I didn’t read.)
Part of my discontent with Wilder’s books is that they compared very poorly to another book covering exactly the same time and place, and published at the same time: Carol Brink’s Caddie Woodlawn. It was based on the life of the author’s grandmother, who grew up in the Wisconsin woods in the 1860s, about five years older than Laura Ingalls. (Brink’s parents died when she was very young, and she was raised by her maternal grandmother and a maternal aunt.) Brink herself was about nine years younger than Rose Wilder, her mother’s collaborator/editor/maybe ghostwriter.
Anyway, I liked Caddie Woodlawn a whole lot more than any of the Little House books. I thought it was better written, and had more interesting characters. And it certainly had a more nuanced portrayal of the relationship between white settlers and Native Americans in Wisconsin in the 1860s. If you are going to defend Little House on the basis that it portrays the attitudes of the times – remembering that its “times” are both the 1860s and the 1930s – then you ought to look at Caddie Woodlawn to understand what other attitudes might have been possible then.
I agree with @rosered55. This isn’t about censorship.
This is about an award. If you were an Osage writer who won this award, would you want to accept an award named for LIW? Or would you be hesitant to do so? Would you accept it and feel called upon in your acceptance speech to point out that you wouldn’t dream of reading her books to your own daughters?
And should such books be read IN elementary school? I don’t mean while a child is in elementary school; I mean in an elementary school classroom. My vote is a resounding NO, especially if there are Native American kids in the class. That doesn’t mean we change history. I doubt there’s an African-American child of elementary school age who is unaware of the history of racism to at least some extent. That doesn’t mean I’d assign the Pippi Longstocking books for classroom reading. (They are great books too and in many ways. Pippi is an admirable character, but certainly the books depict white people as superior to the “natives” and in the illustrations in the original, it’s clear what color skin the natives have. )
Oscar Wilde wrote some wonderful stories for children, but at least one has some blatant antisemitism in it. Okay to read it to a little child? Should we bring back “Little Black Sambo” to preschools?
I’m a lot less sanguine than the rest of you that little children, especially little children who don’t have any members of the group portrayed in their social circle, don’t pick up the attitudes in these books unthinkingly. The fact that some of you don’t even REMEMBER the racism in them says it all.
I’m no better in this regard than anyone else. Recently, I went to see an Off-Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ “Summer and Smoke.” I cringed at the portrayal of the Mexican family ; I had totally forgotten that part of the play. Oh, I remembered there was a Mexican family, but the way Mexicans are portrayed in the play is horrendous and I didn’t recall it at all.
I did read a ton when I was a child. I do recall Caddie Woodlawn, more than LIW books, tho neither of them were particularly treasured by me. It is interesting what resonates and is treasured vs not with different folks.
I loved fairy tales as a young reader and read nearly all those I could get my hands on until the plots all seemed so predictable and were just the same story in different anthologies.
I must have had racist views not to notice. I must have thought that the ethnic slurs were perfectly acceptable, or else I would have noticed them. It would have been better if someone had pointed them out to oblivious me, so that I could learn better at a younger age.
jonri: this whole thead Little Black Sambo has been on my mind, a regular bedtime story from my childhood that I would’t allow for my own children, causing many lamentations of dismay from my parents. “What’s next? Are you banning Uncle Remus too??”
@“Cardinal Fang” I don’t believe that you “must have had racist views” not to notice. One of the things I treasure about re-reading books I loved as a child - I was a very advanced reader, so I read books well above my developmental level - is that as I re-read them, I discover things that had completely eluded me when I first read the books. There is always vocabulary that I skimmed over, picking up the jist by context, but then upon later reading, the book just grows. I took a lot of things literally, and understood them with a child’s understanding of the concrete. My teacher gave me the book Sounder when I was 7; I thought it was a really sad story about a poor boy, his Dad, and a dog. I have read it several times since, and I was probably 13 when I finally wondered why my Guyanian Teacher had chosen that particular book for me.
Similarly, I read A Secret Garden and A Little Princess at around the same time. They were engaging stories; Mary Lennox looked a lot like me, but she was spoiled and horrid and no one loved her, not even her mother, although she was quite rich. Sarah Carew was good, and kind and humble, rich or poor, and I loved these two books. Later I read some controversy over Frances Hodgkin Burnett and the horrible racism and imperialistic colonial attitudes depicted in the books and I was surprised. Of course I knew what they were talking about. Mary was horrible to her Ayah, slapped her and called her a “daughter of pigs”. But I understood that that was part of the REASON no one loved the child, part of the reason she was considered so spoiled and horrid. And in A Little Princess, yes, the neighbor had an Indian Manservant. And Sarah was very kind to him, and respectful. And if it weren’t for these two books, I would have known nothing at all about the British in India -nothing- because it just wasn’t taught at all. So reading about people interacting in their historical context, I at least had an idea of the history. Colonialism in general is not taught in American elementary schools, not that i remember anyway. But because of these books, I understood a little about colonialism, I understood why my Guyanian teacher spoke French, why the very elegant teacher from India had a very british accent. I didn’t get a pedagogical explanation of how one should and shouldn’t treat the cheap local labor when one is an ex patriot, no one had to tell me explicitly that Mary should not have slapped her Nanny, and at the end of the book, I understood that since she was a better person, she would not treat anyone like that again, and that it was her ignorance of the concept of respect for others that had caused people to find her so “disagreeable”.
I am a reader though. I loved making my way through the descriptions and imagining that world. I wonder how different the experience would have been, had someone read those books to me and stopped to lecture me on colonialism and contemporary understanding of racist attitudes. I may have sat thru the whole book, but I wonder if I would ever have reached for it again in my own.