July 20, 2023 • 58 mins
What is our responsibility to the things we loved the most? One answer is to be brutally honest about who and what we love. That’s what we’re doing in this episode. We’re going to take a long, hard look at the worst parts of Laura: the racism, the violence, and xenophobia present in the Little House series. There’s more than you might think. Even Glynnis, a person who thought she knew Laura all the way through, was surprised and sometimes shocked. We also talk about the harm the books have caused and investigate whether the Little House books should still have a place in our classrooms or even on our shelves.
Go deeper:
On Native American History
Mni Sota Makoce: Land of the Dakota by Gwen Westerman and Bruce White
Mean Spirit by Linda Hogan
More on government operated boarding schools for Native children
On Native representation and racism in the Little House books
Little squatters on the Osage Diminished Reserve by Frances W. Kaye
Lizzie Skurnick on Little House’s “Myth of White Self-Sufficiency”
On Black prairie narratives
More on Doctor George A. Tann
Era Bell Thompson: A North Dakota Daughter
Alternate children’s book recommendations:
Prairie Lotus by Linda Sue Park
Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich
Forever Cousins by Laurel Goodluck
More recommendations from Dr. Debbie Reese
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode contains racist depictions and racial slurs from The
Little House Books.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Listeners, please be advised.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
The name of one of the nation's best known children's
authors is being removed from a major literary award.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
In June twenty eighteen, the Children's Division of the American
Library Association, the group that gives out coveted children's book
awards like the Newbery Medal and the Caldecott Medal, announced that,
after much consideration, they were renaming their prestigious Laura Ingalls
Wilder Award.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
The Association for Library Service to Children unanimously voted this
weekend to rename the Laura Ingles Wilder Award the Children's
Literature Legacy Award. Due to negative depictions of Native Americans
and African Americans and Wilder's books.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
It would now be called the Children's Literature Legacy Award.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Here was their reasoning.
Speaker 5 (00:55):
Although Wilders were called a significant place in the history
of children's literature and continues to be read today, ALSC
has had to grapple with inconsistency between Wilder's legacy and
its core of values of inclusiveness, integrity, and respect.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
You will probably not be shocked to hear that people
were upset and angry, outraged. Even it demonstrated the reach
of Laura and Little House. It wasn't just regular fans
who were upset. People like William Shatner aka Captain Kirk
were very, very angry and took to Twitter to express
(01:33):
that anger.
Speaker 6 (01:35):
I find it disturbing that some take modern opinion and
obliterate the past isn't progress learning from our mistaches.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Like a lot of young readers, I loved Laura obviously.
If you've made it this far and wilder, you know this,
and growing up, nothing that is in the books bothered me.
Nothing stood out as a problem. But Laura is a problem.
Speaker 7 (02:03):
You know.
Speaker 8 (02:04):
You push together this coziness with the decimation of Native.
Speaker 9 (02:10):
Tribes, or with you know, the.
Speaker 8 (02:13):
Erasure and bigotry about black people, and even the marrying
off of girls who are very young, and you just
have this confusing diet.
Speaker 9 (02:27):
But of course that's America.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
And the problems of Laura are also disturbingly relevant.
Speaker 10 (02:35):
I think it's important for us to remember that our
past isn't always rosy, that there were controversies, There was,
and racism is still part of our culture now. If
we pretend the past was not as controversial and difficult
(02:55):
and racist as it was.
Speaker 11 (02:57):
Then, how we're going to deal with the racist issues
who are grappling with today.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
When we first envision this podcast, this was the question
I was asking myself, how should I feel about Laura
Ingalls Wilder. I'm obviously not a kid anymore. I'm a
grown up, educated woman. I recognize all the problems with
the books, So what should I be doing with my
love of Laura?
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Now?
Speaker 1 (03:22):
This question is really just a niche version of what
the country has been asking itself about itself for a
while now, what some citizens have been pointing out for centuries,
and it's a question that finally went mainstream after twenty sixteen.
We've all been asked to consider what we love and
(03:43):
how we love it, and often whether we should be
letting it go. From historical statues to entire systems of
government to deeply beloved children's books. Letting go of Laura
is an impossibility for me. She was woven in too deeply,
too early, So it seemed to me the next question
(04:04):
to ask was, what is the responsibility that comes with
this kind of love? In this episode, we're going to
take a deep look at the hardest parts of Laura
Ingalls Wilder. There are a lot of hard parts, more
than you might think. Even I, a person who thought
they knew Laura all the way through, was surprised and
(04:27):
sometimes shocked. I'm Glennis McNicol, and this is Wilder. In
(05:04):
nineteen fifty two, nearly twenty years after the first Little
House Book was published, legendary children's book editor Ursula Nordstrom
received a letter from the parent of a young Little
House reader. Laura was in her eighties by now, and
all her fan mail, and there was a lot, went
through Nordstrom's office. The parent had written to Laura to
(05:26):
say that their child had been upset by a line
on page two of the Little House on the Prairie book.
The line was describing the territory the Ingles were relocating to,
and it read there were no people, Only Indians lived there.
Here's how Nordstrom responded.
Speaker 12 (05:45):
We were indeed disturbed by your letter. We knew that
missus Wilder had not meant to imply that Indians were
not people. I must admit that no one here realized
the words read as they did reading them now. It
seems unbelievable to me that you are the only person
who has picked them up and written to us about
(06:07):
them in the twenty years since the book was published.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Nordstrom then relayed that when Laura had been alerted to
the line, she'd called it a quote stupid blunder.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Of course Indians are people.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
I did not intend to imply they were not. Nordstrom
went on to assure the reader the line would be
changed for all future editions. If you buy the book today,
the line now reads, there were no settlers, only Indians
lived there.
Speaker 13 (06:44):
Half a while.
Speaker 14 (06:45):
Used the right lade to take the US seventy five
rant too.
Speaker 7 (06:48):
Independence.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
It's late September and our producer, Emily and I are
driving to the Little House in the Prairie Museum outside Independence, Kansas.
We are a three hour drive from Kansas City and
another three hours from Oklahoma City.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
We're really, for real in the middle of the country.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Yeah, Kansas, baby, Like, there's something about Wyoming that feels.
Speaker 8 (07:09):
Seventy five south for four miles.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Wild and west. But this just feels very, I don't know,
middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
In the opening chapter of Little House on the Prairie,
when the Ingles set out from peppin Wisconsin, pa asked Laura, quote, do.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
You like going out where the Indians live?
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Laura said she liked it, and then asked if they
were in Indian country now, but they were not. It
was a long long way to Indian territory. The little
house Emily and I are driving toward is the one
pa illegally built when the Ingles arrived at their destination,
the Osage Diminished Reserve, what is now southeastern Kansas. The
(07:53):
site of this museum is the presumed location of the
Little House in the book Little House on the Prairie,
and it's not easy to find. It's down a whole
bunch of side roads, and even Google Map struggles.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
To point the location.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
We arrived shortly before closing hours wow after hours admission.
But just as we're about to wander the site, a
woman named Ronda appears.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
I decided to know I.
Speaker 15 (08:17):
Close up everything aside that you can walk the rounds
as long as.
Speaker 10 (08:21):
Oh, well, thank you, We're going to commit before them.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Ronda is the person in charge of the museum today,
and she is dressed in full prairie garb, complete with bonnet.
On the museum grounds is a recreation of the little
log cabin that Pap build for his family, and they
believe the well out back is the actual one. Laura
writes about Pap building in the book farm house was.
Speaker 5 (08:42):
Here around eighteen eighty and the post left around eighteen
seventy one.
Speaker 7 (08:46):
Based on the eighteen seventy census in the well and back,
they're pretty sure that this is the area where the
Eagles were illegally squatting in Indian Territory for about a
year and a half.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
H Emily and I had wondered on the way here
how the museum would describe the Engle's time on the
Osage Diminished Reserve. I asked Rhonda if squatting was the
word she used with visitors. It is not a word
used in the book.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
They were squatting, there's no ens abs or bits about it.
Speaker 5 (09:14):
They didn't pay for the land.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
They were here illegally. So you can't take away something
that happened. Let's talk about what actually happens in this book.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Little House on the Prairie is by far the most
controversial book in the Little House series. This is the
book that adults are shocked by when they returned to
it to read to their own children. It's the book
that often requires them to either skip entire passages or
stop and do a lot of explaining.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Here's writer Rebecca Taster.
Speaker 6 (09:46):
I would say, you know, at the first mention of
Indians or whatever, would I would say, okay, so let
me explain what's going on here. The house that they
moved to or they're building is actually on land that
belongs to people who've been there forever, and it's being
stolen by Laura and Mary and mon Pa, right like
I would sort of just the most rudimentary, sort of
(10:06):
version of they are building a house on land that
belongs to other people, and this is something that happened
and it's part of how this country was built.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
The closest the book gets to implying that the Ingles
are building on land that doesn't belong to them is
that they are in a place called Indian territory. But
there are plenty of other parts in the book that
are not subtle at all. They are unequivocally racist. The
most violent line from the book comes from the Ingles neighbors,
(10:35):
the Scots, who say more than once quote the only
good Indian is a dead Indian end quote. Laura also
tells us quote Jack hated Indians, and Ma said she
didn't blame him.
Speaker 16 (10:50):
End.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
In the book, Laura describes Native Americans entering the ingles
illegally constructed house. First time it happens Ma's home alone,
and the Native Americans eat all the food she is cooking.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
The naked wild men stood by the fireplace. Their faces
were bold, fierce, and terrible. These wild men had no hair.
Another time, two Native Americans come into the house who
are quote dirty, scowling, and meat. They take all the
corn bread, all the fur, all paws tobacco, but then
(11:29):
drop the fur on the way out. At the end
of the chapter, Laura asked Pa, quote, will the government
make these Indians go west?
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Paw tells her yes. Quote.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
When white settlers come into a country, the Indians have
to move on. The government is going to move these
Indians farther west any time.
Speaker 8 (11:52):
Now.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
That's why we're here, Laura.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
White people are going to settle all this country, and
we get the best land because we get here first
and take our pick. Laura does not leave a lot
of room for interpretation when it comes to the opinions
that the people around her express, but she doesn't pass
judgment on them either. A lot of people, even those
(12:17):
who are not Laura apologists, will tell you that in
Little House on the Prairie, Laura was merely relaying what
she heard others.
Speaker 17 (12:23):
Say their childhood memories, and the child's interpretation of the
situation not necessarily filtered through an adult lens.
Speaker 9 (12:36):
That kind of memoir approach.
Speaker 17 (12:39):
This is how I remember it, this is how I
saw it at this time, and I know my childhood
memories are not always accurate.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Gwen Westerman is a professor at Minnesota State University, man
Cato and the director of the Native American Literature Symposium.
Speaker 17 (12:58):
Trying to view her stories through her childhood memories is
a much different experience as a reader than coming in
and say, here are all the terrible things that are
said about Indians, and from what I've found, none of
those things are Laura's thoughts. Those are the words that
(13:22):
she remembers hearing.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Adult Laura the writer does through her fictional child self,
provides some necessary pushback to these views. Early on in
the book, not long after the Ingles arrive in what
they call Indian Territory, Laura asks her mother, quote, why
don't you like Indians, Ma, to which mav replies, quote,
(13:45):
I just don't like them, and don't lick your fingers.
But Laura persists, this is Indian country, isn't it. She says,
what did we come to their country for if you
don't like them. Ma tells her she's not sure where
they are exactly, but that PA has been assured the
(14:05):
territory will be open to settlements soon.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
This is the extent of the questioning that happens.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
The defense that Laura is offering a child's view of
this experience is valid, and that Ma personally is terrified
is understandable. She's alone miles from other settlers, with three
young girls and a husband who, while charming, behaves erradically.
(14:36):
We talked in the last episode how the angles time
squatting on the Osage Diminished Reserve happened in the aftermath
of the US Dakota War of eighteen sixty two, and
how the narratives that came out of that war about quote,
bloodthirsty Indians and vulnerable heroic pioneers dominated the press and
have shaped our understanding of that history ever since. Absent
(14:59):
from that narrative and the books is any understanding that
one of the reasons Native Americans might have been in
the house was that they were starving and that the
treaties that promised to feed them had been betrayed. Settlers
were illegally on their land, and they often viewed food
as rent. That's likely the reason they came into the
(15:20):
Ingles home to begin with. One of the more complicated
things Laura the writer pulls off time and again in
the Little House series is letting us know Ma's views
are wrong, but also that Laura loves her, which is
a definition of family I certainly related to even as
a young child. But Laura was also writing the books
(15:42):
in the nineteen thirties, and while she seems able to
insert some awareness of conflicting views around the Ingle's presence
on Native American land, this awareness is limited.
Speaker 13 (15:58):
I wouldn't exaggerate how much she may have known about
the history.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Laura's biographer, Caroline Fraser, thinks there were limits to Laura's knowledge.
Speaker 13 (16:09):
She tried to find out the name of the chief
who her father may have encountered, but she didn't do
very much in the way of reading history that we
know of, and so I don't really know how much
she knew. She did know that the land that her
(16:32):
father had built on did not belong to ho much.
She knew that, she knew he was a squatter, But
I don't know that she had any kind of modern
conceptions about the fairness or the ways in which her
family was illegally appropriating things that didn't belong to them.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
That conception of fairness is, I think at the heart
of what's most troubling in this book. Laura seems unable
or unwilling to fully understand Native Americans as human beings.
I want to turn to a specific scene in the
final chapters of Little House on the Prairie. If you're
familiar with the books, you've probably been wondering why we
(17:14):
haven't mentioned it yet. It's so strange and disturbing. When
the Ingles first set out for what they call Indian Territory,
Pa promises Laura that when they quote came to the west,
Laura would see a papoose, which Paw tells her is
a quote little brown Indian baby. Near the end of
(17:36):
the book, in a chapter titled Indians Ride Away, the
Osage tribe who have been conducting what Pa understands to
be war chants in the.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
River Valley every night for a week leave.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
The Ingles stand in front of their home as the
osage foul by the house on their horses. Laura has
a quote naughty wished to be a little Indian girl.
Of course, she did not really mean it. She only
wanted to be naked in the wind and the sunshine
and riding one of those gay little ponies.
Speaker 10 (18:10):
End quote.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Then Laura spots a Native American baby with hair quote
as black as a crow.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Those quote black.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Eyes looked deep into Laura's eyes, and she looked deep
down into the blackness of that little baby's eyes, and
she wanted that one little baby.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
End quote. Laura says to Paw, quote, Paw, get me
that little Indian baby. I want it. I want it,
she begged. End quote.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Paw, to his credit or to Laura's, decades later, tells
Laura quote sternly to hush.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
It's one of the few moments in the series. Pa
gets stern with Laura.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Caroline Fraser believes this scene is a direct memory of
Laura's who, as we talked about in an earlier episode,
would have been just three years old at this time.
When I said earlier that nothing had stood out to
me as strange in the Little House Books, this scene
is the exception. Even as a child, I found Laura's
(19:17):
desire to acquire a Native American infant absolutely bizarre. I
wasn't the only one. It stuck out to journalist Mariene O'Connor,
who also loved the books growing up.
Speaker 18 (19:30):
And that moment also is like kind of horrifying because
she wants this like just like, PA, go get me.
That is my toy. I want it more than you know.
And she didn't even beg for dolls that hard. But
then she also in that same passage, I believe, describes
how she also wishes that she was one of those
children or she wants to own, and that sort of bizarre.
The way that she sort of processes those feelings is layered,
(19:52):
maybe I don't know, and horrified.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
It was emblazoned on my childhood brain also, And what
I clearly remember is that I desperately wanted to know
what the Native American baby was seeing. I wanted to
know what the infant traveling with their mother alongside a
pony into the unknown saw when they looked at Laura.
(20:16):
But we are never given that. There's no mention of
where the osage tribe is going, or any sense of
what the future might hold for the Native American children
Laura is so mesmerized by in this scene, including the
violence of the government funded residential school systems.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
We've included links.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
With more information on these histories in our show notes,
and we encourage you to learn more about these stories.
We do know that while Laura did some research, she
didn't seem too interested in finding out that much more.
Here's Lizzie Skurnick, writer and professor of children's literature at NYU.
Speaker 8 (20:51):
What we do know is that she personally, as a
human was not very interested in getting the larger story
and never went beyond the context she was personally taught,
which is just not true of everybody that's her age.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Not once does Laura ever attempt to imagine someone else's
impression of her. Never once does she wonder how she
might appear and by extension, offer the same fullness of
experience to anyone else that she gives to her own family.
Speaker 7 (21:27):
Books like Little House in the Prairie that have these
like naked Indians who can't speak English, then we come
to think of Native peoples as savage, primitive people. We
were miseducated. That's not the truth.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Here's doctor de wie Reese. Doctor Rees runs a website
called American Indians and Children's Literature.
Speaker 7 (21:47):
We looked different, we lived different, but we're not less human.
We had and have societies, and ordered societies, have leaders,
and that's what we need to know about who we
were before Europeans came to our homelands.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Any awareness of that complexity or history is completely absent
from the Little House books. As I said, Little House
on the Prairie of the book didn't shock me when
I went back to reread it for this podcast.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
I knew what was there.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
I was familiar with the arguments for and against it.
What did surprise me was the extent to which the
problems of Laura are not limited to just this one book.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
We're going to get to that after the break.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Let's stick with the book Little House on the Prairie
for just a little while longer. In addition to the
ways Native Americans were depicted, there's also the issue of
who was left out almost entirely.
Speaker 13 (22:51):
This is our dedication to doctor Oh.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
He's on the census in there, He's right above the ingles,
So that's really cool.
Speaker 19 (22:58):
He is buried in Independence in the White Cemetery, which
was a big deal back there.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
That's Ronda again from the Little House Museum outside of Independence, Kansas,
and she's showing us a display at the museum about
a man called doctor Tan. Three quarters of the way
through the book, the Ingles family comes down with malaria,
then called agu In the midst of their illness, a
black doctor arrives. Quote Laura could not take her eyes
(23:27):
off Doc Tan. He was so very black. She would
have been afraid of him if she hadn't liked him
so much. Doc Tan had a quote rolling jolly laugh,
and we're told the Ingles all wanted him to stay longer.
Laura's very clear that Doc Tan saves their lives. We're
also told he's a quote doctor with the Indians, but
(23:50):
nothing else. In real life, Doctor George A. Tan was
a well known doctor on the prairie. Of course he
he's a real person.
Speaker 8 (24:01):
And by the way, what's fascinating is in the books
he just sort of appears for a second.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
This is Lizzie Skarnick again.
Speaker 9 (24:07):
He delivered Carrie.
Speaker 8 (24:09):
He was the person who delivered carry He was their
family doctor. And also he was in Oklahoma Territory. I
think he finally settled in Oklahoma Territory and that's where
his house was.
Speaker 9 (24:19):
But he was very successful.
Speaker 8 (24:20):
He treated the o sage, he treated the white people,
he treated anybody else, and he was beloved and very
famous and ended his life very wealthy because he actually
owned the land he was on.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
He owned the oil rights.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
In the book, Doc Tan appears as a side character,
which at the time is likely how Laura experienced him
she was a kid. But here's what really stands out
to me in this chapter. At the very end of it,
Laura steps out of the narrative and takes the time
to explain to the reader that agu was later discovered
(24:56):
to be malaria passed on by mosquitoes. But nothing extra
about Doc Tan was included, even though, as Lizzie points out,
Doc Tan was very well known and it wouldn't actually
have taken a lot of digging to find out and
include a bit more information.
Speaker 9 (25:14):
My dad was Jewish, my mother was black.
Speaker 8 (25:16):
I had been exposed all my life to white people
talking about black people, and to me, this was another
way to see white people's views of people who.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Were not white.
Speaker 8 (25:27):
So even then I was like I remember being glad
to see Doc Tann. I remember being glad to see
a person in the books who was a good person
and a black person. But also when I learned more
about him, because my own mother's family are people from
all black towns in Oklahoma Territory, from a town called Bully,
(25:49):
So when I learned more about that, I did feel
like and I didn't blame this on Lora Angos wild
or a Rose Wilder Lane. It was just something where
I was like, oh God, we always get these small
pieces of the story as if everybody here is an
exception where's they're not.
Speaker 9 (26:07):
They're just a facet.
Speaker 8 (26:08):
Of what's an enormous world, and it's just the part
of the story that the white person chows to tell
that was interesting to them. And then I always do
wonder you think back on it, and I'm like, you know,
does Laura remember who delivered baby Carrie? You know, did
Rose Wilder Lane try to hide it?
Speaker 1 (26:30):
We don't know for certain what Rose or Laura decided
to hide or why, but we do know there were
plenty of black homesteaders on the prairie at the same
time as the Ingles.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Here's historian Flannery Burke.
Speaker 20 (26:44):
Black farmers were there, you know, for all the parts
of the story, the hard winters, the family togetherness, the
sleigh rides, the frustrated relationship with major corporations like the railroad,
but they don't often ter common conversation.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
And black homesteaders had their own reasons for migrating west.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Here's Lizzie Skernick again.
Speaker 8 (27:09):
It was the same reason my great grandparents went to
is the same reason anyone went to the territories. But
I think black people also went because it was this
idea of, well, there's not going to be slavery, and
we can sort of form our own communities here.
Speaker 9 (27:23):
We have a little more space, and hopefully there's not.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
So many white people that can round us up and
kill us.
Speaker 8 (27:29):
Get the more space from this issue at this juncture.
Speaker 21 (27:34):
You know.
Speaker 8 (27:34):
And also, like everyone's a pioneer. People in general like
to be pioneers of all types. It's just we only
tell one pioneer story.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
Lauren Rose stuck to that one pioneer story throughout the
entire Little House series. And as I said earlier, when
I went back to reread the entire series, I realized
there were a lot more problems. Some stand right out,
like the chapter titled Indian Warning at the beginning of
the Long Winter, when Pa encounters an elderly Native American
(28:10):
band who predicts the coming winter. This scene is fictional,
by the way, and likely inserted by Rose. There are
plenty of other examples, more than we can possibly get
to in this episode. But when I went back to
reread the series, some really stood out, and I talked
them through with Joe. So, Joe, you have finished reading
(28:33):
Little House on the Prairie, the book with Charlie, and
I'm curious about if anything in there shocked you, and
also if anything in there shocked Charlie.
Speaker 14 (28:45):
Yeah, Charlie's now almost six, and there are some.
Speaker 11 (28:49):
Things that definitely stand out to him.
Speaker 14 (28:53):
He knows things. He knows things that I didn't know
as a kid, and he points them out. The things
that really stood out were Ma's intense reactions to the
Native Americans, who they call Indians in the book, and
he corrected the book. He said they should be called
Native Americans, and I said, good job, public school system
of Philadelphia. But he said, He's like, I just don't
(29:17):
understand why Ma hates them so much. And I asked him,
I was like, well, do you think that she would
be scared she was living alone Paul left them on
the prairie, and he said, yeah, he's like, I'd be
scared if any man walked into my house. She seems
specifically scared of these Native Americans. And I thought that
(29:41):
was interesting that he saw her whole reaction as so outsized.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
I love that Charlie spotted all that. It does speak
well of the.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Culture kids are growing up and now, because when I
was a kid, none of this flagged to me, except
that final scene, which I thought was absolutely bizarre. I
have to say when I read the rest of the books,
because Little House in the Prairie of the book is
the one that gets the most attention.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
It has the most overt racism.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
And so when I went back to reread the rest
of the books, that's where I was like, wait a second, we're.
Speaker 14 (30:12):
Going to continue the series, and so could you tell
me some more red flags that I have yet to encounter.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
The phrase you'll be as brown as an Indian is
repeatedly aimed at Laura when she's not wearing her bonnet,
including it being the final thing her family says to
her when she leaves home.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
To marry Almonzo, and.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
It's greeted as this like phrase of affection and things
like on the banks of Plum Creek, Laura writes it,
they're now safe from wolves and Indians. Like there's this
sort of persistent blending of Native Americans and as animals,
as animals, as animals, wildlife. It happens more than once.
It's not just that one phrase. There's also the phrase
(30:55):
I'm free white and American that.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Repeatedly comes up. I mean, on the one hand.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
That's the truth, right, Like, there is a truth to that,
but that truth is not what's being conveyed when that
phrase is used in these books. That phrase is being
used as like manifest destiny. I guess, a phrase of
total entitlement.
Speaker 14 (31:16):
A phrase of entitlement instead of a checking of privilege exactly.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
Like there's no there's no sort of like I'm free
white in American and therefore I can do what I
want unlike everyone else that currently is in this country.
It's really just like it is a total entitlement, Like
how dare you.
Speaker 11 (31:32):
I'm free white and American, so I deserve yep.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
You can't touch me.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
And then this really stood out to me I'd never
noticed this before.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
At the beginning of The Long Winter, Laura wants to.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Go help Paw in the field to harvest, and we're
told that Ma doesn't like to see women working in
the field.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Quote only foreigners did.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
That Ma and her girls were American above doing men's work,
and that when I read that, read that a couple times.
And part of the reason I think it never stood
out to me before is because by that point in
the series, we're so accustomed to dismissing Ma's racist views
as like, not as problematic, but as like annoying because
(32:17):
they're just keeping Laura from doing what she wants. So
it is never like, oh, this is a problem that
Mas says this because it's racist, it was a problem.
Goes like, oh, there's Ma. She doesn't want Laura to
have fun anymore, you know, And going back and seeing that.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
And just thinking like, oh wow.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
And then of course there's the entire chapter in Littletown
on the Prairie where there's a big blackface scene.
Speaker 11 (32:39):
Right, I have not gotten to that yet.
Speaker 14 (32:42):
And what I'm thinking, as you're going through all of
this is how do I talk to Charlie about these
things and about these issues because I think it could
be used as a way to teach history, to say
these our views that some people did have, this is
what we believe now, and as a way to show
(33:06):
him that sentiments evolve, right.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Yes, I mean, I can tell you as a kid,
I didn't know what blackface meant. And in the chapter,
I remember it as Pa putting shoe polish on his face,
and I just thought it was like a Halloween costume
to disguise himself, and Ma's big concern is that he
might have shaved his beard. Rose inserted this scene. This
(33:32):
never happened. So Rose intentionally inserted a blackface scene in
littletown on the Prairie that Laura.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Was okay with. That's not actually a reflection of.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
What actually happened, although it is absolutely a reflection of
the kind of entertainment that was happening, both at that
time and at the time the books were being written
in the thirties. But all of this, of course, without
any context for Glenna's age eight, is just a scene
in which we get to see Pau having fun and
Laura enjoying it in the town, having a party. And
(34:04):
when I went back and reread that chapter, it's breathtaking
in the worst possible way, and a lot of discussions
around the problems with the series. So much focus is
on the one book, but it's the fabric.
Speaker 11 (34:21):
It's endemic to the whole series, is what you're.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
Saying, woven in in a way that I think reflects
the degree to which it's woven in our storytelling. Like
it's just sometimes when we talk about Laura, it's like
she's a problem, and in understanding the degree to which
it is woven throughout the books, you're like, it's all
a problem.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
This is not just a problem of Laura.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Remember that parent who wrote to complain about the opening
pages of Little House. Here's the part of editor Ursula
Nordstrum's response that stood out the most to me.
Speaker 12 (34:58):
No one here the words read as they did. It
seems unbelievable to me that you are the only person
who has picked them up and written to us about
them in the twenty years since the book was published.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
In all those years, no one, including the people who
had published the book, had spotted the problem.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
But perhaps it's.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Not that surprising no one had noticed when you consider
the problem is everywhere.
Speaker 8 (35:29):
You know, blackface is entertainment, right, that was always the
problem that remains the problem.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
This is Lizzie Skarnick again that.
Speaker 8 (35:39):
People are like, ah, he loves these Confederate statues.
Speaker 9 (35:42):
We grew up with them.
Speaker 8 (35:44):
It creates a psychological hurdle that many people cannot get
over clearly. And I think Laura fans that it's like, wow,
you know, there's that Indian baby I wanted to steal.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
So God's great.
Speaker 9 (36:01):
And then you have this generation of.
Speaker 8 (36:03):
Children who want a papoos to think of Native children as.
Speaker 9 (36:07):
Dolls and not a little child. You know.
Speaker 8 (36:10):
You push together this coziness with you know, the decimation
of Native.
Speaker 9 (36:17):
Tribes, or with you know, the.
Speaker 8 (36:20):
Erasure and bigotry about black people, you know, and even
the marrying off of girls who are very young, and
you just have this confusing diet.
Speaker 9 (36:35):
But of course that's America.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Besides the beautiful descriptions and feelings of coziness, there's something
else going on in the books that discourages us from
questioning any part of what we're reading or someone else,
and that's Paw. We talked a lot in a previous
episode about reconsidering Paw with grown up eyes, and one
of those reconsiderations is under standing the role he plays
(37:01):
as the quintessential white savior. In Little House here's Rebecca
Tracter again.
Speaker 6 (37:07):
Paw is presented as the most humane in the family
and the person who is able to acknowledge, even in
very small ways, the humanity of the people who he's displacing.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Lizzie Skernick spotted it immediately.
Speaker 8 (37:22):
I was like, oh, this is another situation in which Pa,
as the white guy, gets to decide which Indians are
good Indians are bad Indians.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Doctor Rees notes that the so called good Indians are
always the ones who help the white people.
Speaker 7 (37:38):
Paw has a line where he says he tries to
rationalize what a good or a bad Indian is, and
the good Indian, according to Paw, is the one that
rides in to stop the other Indians from attacking the
little House on the prairie. So that's a good Indian,
(37:58):
according to Paw. So what are the ones that are
in the river bottoms? I guess they're bad Indians and
the only good Indian is a dead Indian. Applause is
to those ones, but not to the one who saved them.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
This happens more than once and by the shores of
Silver Lake, as the Ingles are crossing the desolate prairie.
They are set upon by threatening figures and then rescued
by a man named Big Jerry. Quote, everything's all right now,
PA said, that's Big Jerry.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Who's Big Jerry? MA asked. He's a half breed French
and Indian.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
PA answered carelessly, a gambler and some say a horse thief,
but a darned good fellow. Big Jerry won't let anybody
waylay us.
Speaker 9 (38:44):
Yes, he's a half breed.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
This is Lizzie Skernick again.
Speaker 8 (38:49):
So as a half breed, and what he is is
he's a half breed who protects all the white people,
and so his role is.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
To protect Pa. Here's how Big is described. He looks
like an Indian.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
He was tall and big, but not one bit fat,
and his thin face was brown. His straight black hair
swung against his flat, high bone cheek as he rode,
for he wore no hat. As a kid, I was like, great,
Big Jerry is here, Everything is going to be fine.
(39:24):
Paul likes him, and therefore I understand he's both safe
and probably fun.
Speaker 9 (39:30):
Of course, you love Big Jerry. He's like a hero,
but he's also kind of bad.
Speaker 8 (39:34):
But what's also so clear about Big Jerry is that
like he exists in the white world, you know, and
he's almost like pause representative in the camp, you know, pause,
not comfortable in like civilization.
Speaker 15 (39:50):
You know.
Speaker 8 (39:50):
He doesn't really like his job there, so he sort
of needs a heavy And that's Big Jerry.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
And his snow white horse wore no saddle nor bridle.
The horse was free. He could go wherever he wanted
to go, and he wanted to go with Big Jerry
wherever Big Jerry wanted to ride.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
The horse and the man moved together as if they
were one animal.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
As I said earlier, something else that stood out to
me on this reread is that Laura and or Rose
have a habit of aligning Native Americans with animals. I
say or Rose because Big Jerry is a fictional creation,
and of.
Speaker 8 (40:33):
Course Big Jerry again like totally made up story. I mean,
I think the idea is that that person did exist.
None of that ever happened, nor if it happened, it
happened very differently.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
And I think that's what we keep coming back to
that with all this context, it's easier to see that
it did happen very differently for everyone whether or not
they are actually included in the books. But having that context,
what do we do with it? How do we go
forward with Little House and Laura knowing all this? After
(41:07):
the break, we'll talk to doctor Reese again about how
she believes we should think about and teach Little House.
Speaker 22 (41:15):
I think they are a good book to use in
a college classroom. Get studies what we might call propaganda.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
So, now that we've taken a long, hard look at
what's in the Little House books, it's time to start
asking how should we be interacting with them, How should
we think about them, Should they be in schools at all?
Speaker 2 (41:44):
And if so, how should these books be taught.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
Doctor Reese believes the book should be approached academically.
Speaker 22 (41:53):
I think they are a good book to use in
a college classroom. Get studies what we might call propaganda
or our critical media studies, where you're looking very carefully
at perspective point of view, indoctrination.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Let's talk about propaganda for a minute.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Here's how the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines the word propaganda.
The spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purposes
of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.
Speaker 7 (42:28):
It is an indoctrination because it is asking us to
identify with a people that came onto native homelands and
took their lands and killed their families. But a lot
of Americans need that narrative in order not to feel
negatively about their own family histories here and.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
What they have today.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
We've talked about the ways that the Little Housebooks have
some complicated politics baked into them, from the Fourth of
July speeches to the heroic white settler head West fulfilling
some sort of divine mandate. And then there's Rose's connection
to libertarian ideology, and there is no question that the
libertarian fantasy Rose tried to weave through the Little Housebooks
(43:11):
falls under the heading of propaganda. We also know from
the first episode that The Long Winter was used as
actual American propaganda by General Douglas MacArthur in Japan. But
can we really call the full Little House series a
work of propaganda, or rather, is that the only thing
they are. I'm not convinced that was Laura's intention, nor
(43:34):
that the books would have lasted this long if that
had been their sole purpose. Rose very much intended for
her books to be tools of propaganda for her libertarian beliefs,
and her books, as we know, have not stood the
test of time. We do know, however, that the Little
Housebooks can and have harmed people who are not white.
(43:56):
But what if they were taught to children with some
of the context we've attempted to provide here. I asked
doctor Rees if she felt it would be enough to
teach the Little House Books critically to kids, or in
conjunction with books that describe the experience from the point
of view of a native child. But doctor Rees thinks
this wouldn't go far enough.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
When a book.
Speaker 7 (44:15):
Wins awards or is love, it is because of the writing.
In some way, it is beckoning to the reader. And
so when you try to ask someone to start reading
the book and then stop and think critically about that character,
you're doing this twist on their heart, their head, their emotions,
all of that. If your goal is to understand racism,
(44:36):
you don't need to do it using a book like this,
where you're asking kids to read it from cover to cover.
A professor friend of mine said, if you want to
teach racism and older books like that, just rip the
book apart. Give reading group number one, Chapter one and
the second reading group.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
Chapter two, Doctor Rees believes it's impossible to give these
books to children and expect them to understand the context,
even if it is provided.
Speaker 7 (45:02):
I think the harm is too great because it's not
just that harm, it's the context of larger, more widespread harms.
So it's just one more saying that Native children have
to endure, and it's one more thing that non Native
children go through that affirms those mistaken ideas that they
get just as a matter of life.
Speaker 11 (45:23):
In the United States.
Speaker 7 (45:24):
And why can't Native kids have stories that affirm them
like other people do, instead of having to deal with
that story in their classroom.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
Doctories advocates for Little House only having a place in
the college level classroom, which made us curious, what does
it look like when Little House is used in this manner?
Speaker 2 (45:45):
What is it like to encounter.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Little House for the first time as a grown person,
particularly for people from younger generations who have grown up
with a lot more resources and viewpoints than many of
us did. It turns out I would soon get an
answer to this question. While we were in the early
stages of making this podcast, I woke up one morning
(46:07):
to a series of messages on my phone from various
friends and even just acquaintances. They were all sending me
the same tweet that had gone viral. Here's what the
tweet said, did you read the Little House on the
Prairie books as a child, and if so.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
How old are you now?
Speaker 1 (46:28):
I'm teaching a class and none of the students have
heard of these titles, much less read them. I'm trying
to see when these books fell out of favor.
Speaker 3 (46:38):
So I just came home and threw up on Twitter,
like did you read these books? And if so, when,
because I kind of wanted to see maybe when they
stopped being popular.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
That's doctor Julia H.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
Lee, professor of Asian American Studies at You See Irvine.
She sent that tweet out not expecting such a huge response.
Speaker 3 (46:59):
I have a very small, small, small footprint on Twitter,
but I was shocked at the number of responses I got.
And I'm still getting responses almost two months later, So
over four thousand people responding I read the books when
I was this age. I never read the books, and
(47:20):
so it was just really really interesting to see how
many people wanted to talk about the books and their
experience reading them.
Speaker 1 (47:30):
On the one hand, the amount of responses Doctor Lee
received definitely proved the books are still as popular as ever.
On the other hand, the reaction was mixed. I would
say that more.
Speaker 3 (47:42):
People were like, I love them and I've passed them
on to my children, but there were I think a
significant number of people who said, I read the books,
but I'm not planning on passing them on to my
own children or to young people in my life, because
I realized now how problematic they are.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
Doctor Lee had sent out this tweet in the first
place because of an experience she had had in her classroom.
Speaker 3 (48:03):
I'm currently teaching a class that you see I called
the Asian American West, and one of the novels that
we're reading is by Linda Sue Park and it's called
Prairie Lotus and it's a Asian American retelling of Little
House on the Prairie.
Speaker 1 (48:18):
As part of the preparation, Doctor Lee assigned Little House
on the Prairie the book.
Speaker 3 (48:24):
And before we started talking about Little House, I always
ask my students this, how many of you've read this
book before?
Speaker 2 (48:31):
And none of the students.
Speaker 3 (48:32):
Raise their hand, which is quite common, but they kind
of looked at me funny. While I was asking this,
and I said, how many of you've heard of this
book before? And none of them had, none of them.
But I was really taken aback because these books have
been huge in my own childhood, and I had assumed
that the popularity still lingered.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
Once her students did read the book, they definitely had thoughts.
Speaker 3 (48:56):
I think it was really interesting to see it through
the eyes of my students, because they had a lot
to say about all.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
You know, it was a little bit of.
Speaker 3 (49:05):
I can't believe they let children read this, And their
analysis was really spot on, you know. They talked about
how not only the kind of representation of Native Americans
and the kind of the hateful rhetoric directed towards them,
but also the book's representation of gender and patriarchy and
kind of all of those things. And so I don't
(49:27):
think any of them would say, oh, yeah, this is
a okay I put on reading to my own children
or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (49:32):
Quite quite opposite.
Speaker 1 (49:35):
This got us curious had the Little House Books and
all their many problems, finally lost their broad appeal to
younger generations. In December, we went to a college classroom
where the Little House Books were being taught. We wanted
to try and dig deeper into this question. Lizzie Skirnik
allowed us to participate in her class at NYU on
(49:55):
historical fiction writing. The students had been assigned Little House
in the Big Wood and Little House on the Prairie.
There are about ten students in the class, and only
a few had read the books as kids. I think
it's fair to say the others were thoroughly unimpressed.
Speaker 23 (50:13):
I wasn't ever read these books when I was a child,
and I'm so happy that my mom decided not to
do that for me.
Speaker 11 (50:21):
It was kind of exciting to see what all the
hype was about. But then it turns out there's no hype.
Speaker 23 (50:28):
I think that so many kids that idolized and romanticized this,
why did they want to do?
Speaker 2 (50:35):
Nothing?
Speaker 16 (50:36):
Like?
Speaker 23 (50:36):
Why did they want to put on aprons?
Speaker 1 (50:40):
When the students moved deeper into their analysis of the books,
their thinking was very in line with everything we've been
talking about in the last six episodes, and the parts
they found the most disturbing could definitely be categorized as propaganda.
Speaker 23 (50:53):
I was thinking, while reading this, what haven't they written?
What histories haven't been written while reading this? And what
have we been like glazy over what other side stories
were happening. And I think as a child, I wouldn't
have liked this because I would think where am I
in this? And that's why I didn't enjoy it as much.
Speaker 21 (51:12):
I don't understand like why America would romanticize this period
after these books, because everything in the books it just
feels so traumatic and I don't know it.
Speaker 11 (51:27):
It's just so messed up.
Speaker 19 (51:29):
I did interact with these as a kid, and I
wasn't into it. I was like I was kind of warned,
not like not allowed to, but kind of like warned
against reading them by my mom because she was like
the racist straight up. And I was like a little kid,
like Okay, I'll take a look for myself. And like
(51:49):
you said, like it's it's it's hard to romanticize it
because it's like I'm not going to romanticize being a settler.
Speaker 16 (51:56):
I also think like it's like very concerning that the
global audience is influenced by this text of what American
history is or what the ideals of American self sufficiency
were and then be romanticized in this book series like
by a Little Girl is just sort of like it's
(52:16):
like the maple syrup on America.
Speaker 1 (52:18):
I was still thinking about doctor Reese's argument that the
Little House books should not be read to children in classrooms.
So I asked these students what they thought. Would these
be books you would give or suggest being read by
small kids, not like you have to.
Speaker 7 (52:34):
Like there is sort of in my family there was
like a this is like required reading to be a
little kid.
Speaker 2 (52:39):
But like it might not. I won't ban it from
a bookshelf, ye like, but not be like you must.
I would never give it to my child.
Speaker 24 (52:46):
I feel like it's just much more important at this
point to have more diversity, Like at this point, it's
like I'd rather that that the focus be on reversing
a lot of the harm that children's books have done.
Speaker 1 (53:00):
These days, kids have a lot of options when it
comes to what they want to read, even when it
comes to pioneer stories. Doctor Julia Lee remarked on how
much things have changed since she was a kid.
Speaker 3 (53:12):
Children's literature and young adult literature is so much richer now,
Like there's so many Like when we were kids, we
were reading probably Little House on the Prairie. We read
Ramona quimb Like you know, it was very like everybody
was kind of reading the same thing, and now I
feel like there's just so much representation that was not
(53:33):
my experience reading as a child. I never expected to
read about Asian people, Korean folks, anything like that.
Speaker 2 (53:41):
So I wasn't even looking. I didn't even know to
look for it.
Speaker 7 (53:44):
Like I just accepted like this was this was what.
Speaker 2 (53:47):
These were the types of characters that people read about.
Speaker 1 (53:50):
Maybe we're in a time where there's so many options
for kids, so many wonderful ways for them to see
themselves in writing and on screen. The Little House is
no longer necessy. This reminded me of something we had
heard in Just Met South Dakota when we talked to
the kids participating in the pageant there.
Speaker 2 (54:08):
I've actually never read the books.
Speaker 7 (54:10):
No.
Speaker 15 (54:12):
I worked at the Memorial Society for a while and
I had to read all the books, and did you
I mean, not my genre, but as a general book,
it's good.
Speaker 2 (54:25):
Fantasy, gay roman.
Speaker 1 (54:29):
When it comes to children's books series that offer alternate representation,
Louise Erdrich's Birch Bark House series is perhaps the most
well known, but we're going to list others. In the
notes to this episode, Doctor Reese also had some suggestions.
Speaker 8 (54:43):
Right now, I'm very keen, very high on Forever Cousins.
Speaker 7 (54:48):
It's a new picture book.
Speaker 22 (54:50):
And it's about these two little girls their cousins. They
actually live in the San Francisco Bay area, but why
are they there? And so in the authorish notes, the
author tells it about one of the government programs that
ask Native people to leave their.
Speaker 7 (55:03):
Homelands in seat up a life in a major city.
And so San Francisco has a huge Native community, and
so these little girls are part of that. So I'd
like people to just use books by Native writers, because
the author's notes that are in there that give context
to what this story is about are vital to undoing
or filling in what teachers did not get when they
(55:25):
were in school.
Speaker 1 (55:30):
So if we have all these other options, why does
Little House continue to have such appeal? In part, it's
for the reasons we've discussed. The coziness and the familiar
mythology are comforting to a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (55:45):
But we also have to recognize that the legacy of finding.
Speaker 1 (55:48):
Comfort in these stories has resulted in an enormous cultural
footprint that is very difficult to extricate from because it
is so comfortable. In the next few episodes, we're taking
a look at the enormity of that cultural imprint.
Speaker 2 (56:06):
Without question.
Speaker 1 (56:07):
One of the reasons Little House is so ingrained in
our culture is that somewhere in the world right now
you can turn on a television and watch the nineteen
seventies TV show that was based on the books. Would
the books even still be around if it weren't for
that iconic show? Do Laura and Rose owe their legacy
to the vision of one man and his rippling pecks
(56:30):
and shiny thick hair.
Speaker 2 (56:33):
Enter Michael Landon.
Speaker 1 (56:36):
For all of Rose's dreams of Little House as a
commercial for libertarian fantasy, even Rose could not have dreamed
up the Little House fantasy that emerged only a few
short years after her death. Next week on Wylder, We're
Going to Hollywood. Wilder is written and hosted by me
(56:58):
Glennis McNichol. Our story editors are Joe Piazza and Emily Meroanoff.
Our senior producer is Emily Meroanof. Our producers are Mary Doo,
Shina Ozaki, and Jessica Crinchich. Our associate producer is Lauren Phillip.
Sound design and mixing by Amanda ro Smith. Production help
from Asavay Sharma, Christina Everett, Julia Weaver and Abou safar
(57:23):
Our scene in additional music was composed by Elise McCoy.
We are executive produced by Joe Piazza, Nikki tor, Ali
Perry and me. If you're enjoying Wilder, please consider rating
and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (57:38):
It actually helps us out quite a lot.
Speaker 1 (57:40):
Thanks to Ronda in the Little House on the Prairie
Museum Outside of Independence, Kansas. Special thanks to Lizzie Skernick
and her wonderful class for letting us join their discussion
and sharing their.
Speaker 2 (57:50):
Thoughts with us.
Speaker 1 (57:51):
And thanks as always to doctor de Wi Reese who
was so generous with her time in scholarship. Thank you
as always to CDM Studios. Listen extensive resources in our
show notes on all the topics we've discussed in this episode,
as well as reading options for the children in your life.
You can also find our contact and go there if
you want to write to us with your own thoughts
and questions. Follow us on Instagram at Wilder Underscore podcast
(58:15):
and on TikTok at Wilder Podcast, where you can see
behind the scenes footage from all our travels.
Speaker 2 (58:22):
Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.
This episode contains racist depictions and racial slurs from The
Little House Books.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Listeners, please be advised.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
The name of one of the nation's best known children's
authors is being removed from a major literary award.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
In June twenty eighteen, the Children's Division of the American
Library Association, the group that gives out coveted children's book
awards like the Newbery Medal and the Caldecott Medal, announced that,
after much consideration, they were renaming their prestigious Laura Ingalls
Wilder Award.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
The Association for Library Service to Children unanimously voted this
weekend to rename the Laura Ingles Wilder Award the Children's
Literature Legacy Award. Due to negative depictions of Native Americans
and African Americans and Wilder's books.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
It would now be called the Children's Literature Legacy Award.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Here was their reasoning.
Speaker 5 (00:55):
Although Wilders were called a significant place in the history
of children's literature and continues to be read today, ALSC
has had to grapple with inconsistency between Wilder's legacy and
its core of values of inclusiveness, integrity, and respect.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
You will probably not be shocked to hear that people
were upset and angry, outraged. Even it demonstrated the reach
of Laura and Little House. It wasn't just regular fans
who were upset. People like William Shatner aka Captain Kirk
were very, very angry and took to Twitter to express
(01:33):
that anger.
Speaker 6 (01:35):
I find it disturbing that some take modern opinion and
obliterate the past isn't progress learning from our mistaches.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Like a lot of young readers, I loved Laura obviously.
If you've made it this far and wilder, you know this,
and growing up, nothing that is in the books bothered me.
Nothing stood out as a problem. But Laura is a problem.
Speaker 7 (02:03):
You know.
Speaker 8 (02:04):
You push together this coziness with the decimation of Native.
Speaker 9 (02:10):
Tribes, or with you know, the.
Speaker 8 (02:13):
Erasure and bigotry about black people, and even the marrying
off of girls who are very young, and you just
have this confusing diet.
Speaker 9 (02:27):
But of course that's America.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
And the problems of Laura are also disturbingly relevant.
Speaker 10 (02:35):
I think it's important for us to remember that our
past isn't always rosy, that there were controversies, There was,
and racism is still part of our culture now. If
we pretend the past was not as controversial and difficult
(02:55):
and racist as it was.
Speaker 11 (02:57):
Then, how we're going to deal with the racist issues
who are grappling with today.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
When we first envision this podcast, this was the question
I was asking myself, how should I feel about Laura
Ingalls Wilder. I'm obviously not a kid anymore. I'm a
grown up, educated woman. I recognize all the problems with
the books, So what should I be doing with my
love of Laura?
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Now?
Speaker 1 (03:22):
This question is really just a niche version of what
the country has been asking itself about itself for a
while now, what some citizens have been pointing out for centuries,
and it's a question that finally went mainstream after twenty sixteen.
We've all been asked to consider what we love and
(03:43):
how we love it, and often whether we should be
letting it go. From historical statues to entire systems of
government to deeply beloved children's books. Letting go of Laura
is an impossibility for me. She was woven in too deeply,
too early, So it seemed to me the next question
(04:04):
to ask was, what is the responsibility that comes with
this kind of love? In this episode, we're going to
take a deep look at the hardest parts of Laura
Ingalls Wilder. There are a lot of hard parts, more
than you might think. Even I, a person who thought
they knew Laura all the way through, was surprised and
(04:27):
sometimes shocked. I'm Glennis McNicol, and this is Wilder. In
(05:04):
nineteen fifty two, nearly twenty years after the first Little
House Book was published, legendary children's book editor Ursula Nordstrom
received a letter from the parent of a young Little
House reader. Laura was in her eighties by now, and
all her fan mail, and there was a lot, went
through Nordstrom's office. The parent had written to Laura to
(05:26):
say that their child had been upset by a line
on page two of the Little House on the Prairie book.
The line was describing the territory the Ingles were relocating to,
and it read there were no people, Only Indians lived there.
Here's how Nordstrom responded.
Speaker 12 (05:45):
We were indeed disturbed by your letter. We knew that
missus Wilder had not meant to imply that Indians were
not people. I must admit that no one here realized
the words read as they did reading them now. It
seems unbelievable to me that you are the only person
who has picked them up and written to us about
(06:07):
them in the twenty years since the book was published.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Nordstrom then relayed that when Laura had been alerted to
the line, she'd called it a quote stupid blunder.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Of course Indians are people.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
I did not intend to imply they were not. Nordstrom
went on to assure the reader the line would be
changed for all future editions. If you buy the book today,
the line now reads, there were no settlers, only Indians
lived there.
Speaker 13 (06:44):
Half a while.
Speaker 14 (06:45):
Used the right lade to take the US seventy five
rant too.
Speaker 7 (06:48):
Independence.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
It's late September and our producer, Emily and I are
driving to the Little House in the Prairie Museum outside Independence, Kansas.
We are a three hour drive from Kansas City and
another three hours from Oklahoma City.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
We're really, for real in the middle of the country.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Yeah, Kansas, baby, Like, there's something about Wyoming that feels.
Speaker 8 (07:09):
Seventy five south for four miles.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Wild and west. But this just feels very, I don't know,
middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
In the opening chapter of Little House on the Prairie,
when the Ingles set out from peppin Wisconsin, pa asked Laura, quote, do.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
You like going out where the Indians live?
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Laura said she liked it, and then asked if they
were in Indian country now, but they were not. It
was a long long way to Indian territory. The little
house Emily and I are driving toward is the one
pa illegally built when the Ingles arrived at their destination,
the Osage Diminished Reserve, what is now southeastern Kansas. The
(07:53):
site of this museum is the presumed location of the
Little House in the book Little House on the Prairie,
and it's not easy to find. It's down a whole
bunch of side roads, and even Google Map struggles.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
To point the location.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
We arrived shortly before closing hours wow after hours admission.
But just as we're about to wander the site, a
woman named Ronda appears.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
I decided to know I.
Speaker 15 (08:17):
Close up everything aside that you can walk the rounds
as long as.
Speaker 10 (08:21):
Oh, well, thank you, We're going to commit before them.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Ronda is the person in charge of the museum today,
and she is dressed in full prairie garb, complete with bonnet.
On the museum grounds is a recreation of the little
log cabin that Pap build for his family, and they
believe the well out back is the actual one. Laura
writes about Pap building in the book farm house was.
Speaker 5 (08:42):
Here around eighteen eighty and the post left around eighteen
seventy one.
Speaker 7 (08:46):
Based on the eighteen seventy census in the well and back,
they're pretty sure that this is the area where the
Eagles were illegally squatting in Indian Territory for about a
year and a half.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
H Emily and I had wondered on the way here
how the museum would describe the Engle's time on the
Osage Diminished Reserve. I asked Rhonda if squatting was the
word she used with visitors. It is not a word
used in the book.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
They were squatting, there's no ens abs or bits about it.
Speaker 5 (09:14):
They didn't pay for the land.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
They were here illegally. So you can't take away something
that happened. Let's talk about what actually happens in this book.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Little House on the Prairie is by far the most
controversial book in the Little House series. This is the
book that adults are shocked by when they returned to
it to read to their own children. It's the book
that often requires them to either skip entire passages or
stop and do a lot of explaining.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Here's writer Rebecca Taster.
Speaker 6 (09:46):
I would say, you know, at the first mention of
Indians or whatever, would I would say, okay, so let
me explain what's going on here. The house that they
moved to or they're building is actually on land that
belongs to people who've been there forever, and it's being
stolen by Laura and Mary and mon Pa, right like
I would sort of just the most rudimentary, sort of
(10:06):
version of they are building a house on land that
belongs to other people, and this is something that happened
and it's part of how this country was built.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
The closest the book gets to implying that the Ingles
are building on land that doesn't belong to them is
that they are in a place called Indian territory. But
there are plenty of other parts in the book that
are not subtle at all. They are unequivocally racist. The
most violent line from the book comes from the Ingles neighbors,
(10:35):
the Scots, who say more than once quote the only
good Indian is a dead Indian end quote. Laura also
tells us quote Jack hated Indians, and Ma said she
didn't blame him.
Speaker 16 (10:50):
End.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
In the book, Laura describes Native Americans entering the ingles
illegally constructed house. First time it happens Ma's home alone,
and the Native Americans eat all the food she is cooking.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
The naked wild men stood by the fireplace. Their faces
were bold, fierce, and terrible. These wild men had no hair.
Another time, two Native Americans come into the house who
are quote dirty, scowling, and meat. They take all the
corn bread, all the fur, all paws tobacco, but then
(11:29):
drop the fur on the way out. At the end
of the chapter, Laura asked Pa, quote, will the government
make these Indians go west?
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Paw tells her yes. Quote.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
When white settlers come into a country, the Indians have
to move on. The government is going to move these
Indians farther west any time.
Speaker 8 (11:52):
Now.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
That's why we're here, Laura.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
White people are going to settle all this country, and
we get the best land because we get here first
and take our pick. Laura does not leave a lot
of room for interpretation when it comes to the opinions
that the people around her express, but she doesn't pass
judgment on them either. A lot of people, even those
(12:17):
who are not Laura apologists, will tell you that in
Little House on the Prairie, Laura was merely relaying what
she heard others.
Speaker 17 (12:23):
Say their childhood memories, and the child's interpretation of the
situation not necessarily filtered through an adult lens.
Speaker 9 (12:36):
That kind of memoir approach.
Speaker 17 (12:39):
This is how I remember it, this is how I
saw it at this time, and I know my childhood
memories are not always accurate.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Gwen Westerman is a professor at Minnesota State University, man
Cato and the director of the Native American Literature Symposium.
Speaker 17 (12:58):
Trying to view her stories through her childhood memories is
a much different experience as a reader than coming in
and say, here are all the terrible things that are
said about Indians, and from what I've found, none of
those things are Laura's thoughts. Those are the words that
(13:22):
she remembers hearing.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Adult Laura the writer does through her fictional child self,
provides some necessary pushback to these views. Early on in
the book, not long after the Ingles arrive in what
they call Indian Territory, Laura asks her mother, quote, why
don't you like Indians, Ma, to which mav replies, quote,
(13:45):
I just don't like them, and don't lick your fingers.
But Laura persists, this is Indian country, isn't it. She says,
what did we come to their country for if you
don't like them. Ma tells her she's not sure where
they are exactly, but that PA has been assured the
(14:05):
territory will be open to settlements soon.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
This is the extent of the questioning that happens.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
The defense that Laura is offering a child's view of
this experience is valid, and that Ma personally is terrified
is understandable. She's alone miles from other settlers, with three
young girls and a husband who, while charming, behaves erradically.
(14:36):
We talked in the last episode how the angles time
squatting on the Osage Diminished Reserve happened in the aftermath
of the US Dakota War of eighteen sixty two, and
how the narratives that came out of that war about quote,
bloodthirsty Indians and vulnerable heroic pioneers dominated the press and
have shaped our understanding of that history ever since. Absent
(14:59):
from that narrative and the books is any understanding that
one of the reasons Native Americans might have been in
the house was that they were starving and that the
treaties that promised to feed them had been betrayed. Settlers
were illegally on their land, and they often viewed food
as rent. That's likely the reason they came into the
(15:20):
Ingles home to begin with. One of the more complicated
things Laura the writer pulls off time and again in
the Little House series is letting us know Ma's views
are wrong, but also that Laura loves her, which is
a definition of family I certainly related to even as
a young child. But Laura was also writing the books
(15:42):
in the nineteen thirties, and while she seems able to
insert some awareness of conflicting views around the Ingle's presence
on Native American land, this awareness is limited.
Speaker 13 (15:58):
I wouldn't exaggerate how much she may have known about
the history.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Laura's biographer, Caroline Fraser, thinks there were limits to Laura's knowledge.
Speaker 13 (16:09):
She tried to find out the name of the chief
who her father may have encountered, but she didn't do
very much in the way of reading history that we
know of, and so I don't really know how much
she knew. She did know that the land that her
(16:32):
father had built on did not belong to ho much.
She knew that, she knew he was a squatter, But
I don't know that she had any kind of modern
conceptions about the fairness or the ways in which her
family was illegally appropriating things that didn't belong to them.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
That conception of fairness is, I think at the heart
of what's most troubling in this book. Laura seems unable
or unwilling to fully understand Native Americans as human beings.
I want to turn to a specific scene in the
final chapters of Little House on the Prairie. If you're
familiar with the books, you've probably been wondering why we
(17:14):
haven't mentioned it yet. It's so strange and disturbing. When
the Ingles first set out for what they call Indian Territory,
Pa promises Laura that when they quote came to the west,
Laura would see a papoose, which Paw tells her is
a quote little brown Indian baby. Near the end of
(17:36):
the book, in a chapter titled Indians Ride Away, the
Osage tribe who have been conducting what Pa understands to
be war chants in the.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
River Valley every night for a week leave.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
The Ingles stand in front of their home as the
osage foul by the house on their horses. Laura has
a quote naughty wished to be a little Indian girl.
Of course, she did not really mean it. She only
wanted to be naked in the wind and the sunshine
and riding one of those gay little ponies.
Speaker 10 (18:10):
End quote.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Then Laura spots a Native American baby with hair quote
as black as a crow.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Those quote black.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Eyes looked deep into Laura's eyes, and she looked deep
down into the blackness of that little baby's eyes, and
she wanted that one little baby.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
End quote. Laura says to Paw, quote, Paw, get me
that little Indian baby. I want it. I want it,
she begged. End quote.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Paw, to his credit or to Laura's, decades later, tells
Laura quote sternly to hush.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
It's one of the few moments in the series. Pa
gets stern with Laura.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Caroline Fraser believes this scene is a direct memory of
Laura's who, as we talked about in an earlier episode,
would have been just three years old at this time.
When I said earlier that nothing had stood out to
me as strange in the Little House Books, this scene
is the exception. Even as a child, I found Laura's
(19:17):
desire to acquire a Native American infant absolutely bizarre. I
wasn't the only one. It stuck out to journalist Mariene O'Connor,
who also loved the books growing up.
Speaker 18 (19:30):
And that moment also is like kind of horrifying because
she wants this like just like, PA, go get me.
That is my toy. I want it more than you know.
And she didn't even beg for dolls that hard. But
then she also in that same passage, I believe, describes
how she also wishes that she was one of those
children or she wants to own, and that sort of bizarre.
The way that she sort of processes those feelings is layered,
(19:52):
maybe I don't know, and horrified.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
It was emblazoned on my childhood brain also, And what
I clearly remember is that I desperately wanted to know
what the Native American baby was seeing. I wanted to
know what the infant traveling with their mother alongside a
pony into the unknown saw when they looked at Laura.
(20:16):
But we are never given that. There's no mention of
where the osage tribe is going, or any sense of
what the future might hold for the Native American children
Laura is so mesmerized by in this scene, including the
violence of the government funded residential school systems.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
We've included links.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
With more information on these histories in our show notes,
and we encourage you to learn more about these stories.
We do know that while Laura did some research, she
didn't seem too interested in finding out that much more.
Here's Lizzie Skurnick, writer and professor of children's literature at NYU.
Speaker 8 (20:51):
What we do know is that she personally, as a
human was not very interested in getting the larger story
and never went beyond the context she was personally taught,
which is just not true of everybody that's her age.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Not once does Laura ever attempt to imagine someone else's
impression of her. Never once does she wonder how she
might appear and by extension, offer the same fullness of
experience to anyone else that she gives to her own family.
Speaker 7 (21:27):
Books like Little House in the Prairie that have these
like naked Indians who can't speak English, then we come
to think of Native peoples as savage, primitive people. We
were miseducated. That's not the truth.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Here's doctor de wie Reese. Doctor Rees runs a website
called American Indians and Children's Literature.
Speaker 7 (21:47):
We looked different, we lived different, but we're not less human.
We had and have societies, and ordered societies, have leaders,
and that's what we need to know about who we
were before Europeans came to our homelands.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Any awareness of that complexity or history is completely absent
from the Little House books. As I said, Little House
on the Prairie of the book didn't shock me when
I went back to reread it for this podcast.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
I knew what was there.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
I was familiar with the arguments for and against it.
What did surprise me was the extent to which the
problems of Laura are not limited to just this one book.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
We're going to get to that after the break.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Let's stick with the book Little House on the Prairie
for just a little while longer. In addition to the
ways Native Americans were depicted, there's also the issue of
who was left out almost entirely.
Speaker 13 (22:51):
This is our dedication to doctor Oh.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
He's on the census in there, He's right above the ingles,
So that's really cool.
Speaker 19 (22:58):
He is buried in Independence in the White Cemetery, which
was a big deal back there.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
That's Ronda again from the Little House Museum outside of Independence, Kansas,
and she's showing us a display at the museum about
a man called doctor Tan. Three quarters of the way
through the book, the Ingles family comes down with malaria,
then called agu In the midst of their illness, a
black doctor arrives. Quote Laura could not take her eyes
(23:27):
off Doc Tan. He was so very black. She would
have been afraid of him if she hadn't liked him
so much. Doc Tan had a quote rolling jolly laugh,
and we're told the Ingles all wanted him to stay longer.
Laura's very clear that Doc Tan saves their lives. We're
also told he's a quote doctor with the Indians, but
(23:50):
nothing else. In real life, Doctor George A. Tan was
a well known doctor on the prairie. Of course he
he's a real person.
Speaker 8 (24:01):
And by the way, what's fascinating is in the books
he just sort of appears for a second.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
This is Lizzie Skarnick again.
Speaker 9 (24:07):
He delivered Carrie.
Speaker 8 (24:09):
He was the person who delivered carry He was their
family doctor. And also he was in Oklahoma Territory. I
think he finally settled in Oklahoma Territory and that's where
his house was.
Speaker 9 (24:19):
But he was very successful.
Speaker 8 (24:20):
He treated the o sage, he treated the white people,
he treated anybody else, and he was beloved and very
famous and ended his life very wealthy because he actually
owned the land he was on.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
He owned the oil rights.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
In the book, Doc Tan appears as a side character,
which at the time is likely how Laura experienced him
she was a kid. But here's what really stands out
to me in this chapter. At the very end of it,
Laura steps out of the narrative and takes the time
to explain to the reader that agu was later discovered
(24:56):
to be malaria passed on by mosquitoes. But nothing extra
about Doc Tan was included, even though, as Lizzie points out,
Doc Tan was very well known and it wouldn't actually
have taken a lot of digging to find out and
include a bit more information.
Speaker 9 (25:14):
My dad was Jewish, my mother was black.
Speaker 8 (25:16):
I had been exposed all my life to white people
talking about black people, and to me, this was another
way to see white people's views of people who.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Were not white.
Speaker 8 (25:27):
So even then I was like I remember being glad
to see Doc Tann. I remember being glad to see
a person in the books who was a good person
and a black person. But also when I learned more
about him, because my own mother's family are people from
all black towns in Oklahoma Territory, from a town called Bully,
(25:49):
So when I learned more about that, I did feel
like and I didn't blame this on Lora Angos wild
or a Rose Wilder Lane. It was just something where
I was like, oh God, we always get these small
pieces of the story as if everybody here is an
exception where's they're not.
Speaker 9 (26:07):
They're just a facet.
Speaker 8 (26:08):
Of what's an enormous world, and it's just the part
of the story that the white person chows to tell
that was interesting to them. And then I always do
wonder you think back on it, and I'm like, you know,
does Laura remember who delivered baby Carrie? You know, did
Rose Wilder Lane try to hide it?
Speaker 1 (26:30):
We don't know for certain what Rose or Laura decided
to hide or why, but we do know there were
plenty of black homesteaders on the prairie at the same
time as the Ingles.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Here's historian Flannery Burke.
Speaker 20 (26:44):
Black farmers were there, you know, for all the parts
of the story, the hard winters, the family togetherness, the
sleigh rides, the frustrated relationship with major corporations like the railroad,
but they don't often ter common conversation.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
And black homesteaders had their own reasons for migrating west.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Here's Lizzie Skernick again.
Speaker 8 (27:09):
It was the same reason my great grandparents went to
is the same reason anyone went to the territories. But
I think black people also went because it was this
idea of, well, there's not going to be slavery, and
we can sort of form our own communities here.
Speaker 9 (27:23):
We have a little more space, and hopefully there's not.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
So many white people that can round us up and
kill us.
Speaker 8 (27:29):
Get the more space from this issue at this juncture.
Speaker 21 (27:34):
You know.
Speaker 8 (27:34):
And also, like everyone's a pioneer. People in general like
to be pioneers of all types. It's just we only
tell one pioneer story.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
Lauren Rose stuck to that one pioneer story throughout the
entire Little House series. And as I said earlier, when
I went back to reread the entire series, I realized
there were a lot more problems. Some stand right out,
like the chapter titled Indian Warning at the beginning of
the Long Winter, when Pa encounters an elderly Native American
(28:10):
band who predicts the coming winter. This scene is fictional,
by the way, and likely inserted by Rose. There are
plenty of other examples, more than we can possibly get
to in this episode. But when I went back to
reread the series, some really stood out, and I talked
them through with Joe. So, Joe, you have finished reading
(28:33):
Little House on the Prairie, the book with Charlie, and
I'm curious about if anything in there shocked you, and
also if anything in there shocked Charlie.
Speaker 14 (28:45):
Yeah, Charlie's now almost six, and there are some.
Speaker 11 (28:49):
Things that definitely stand out to him.
Speaker 14 (28:53):
He knows things. He knows things that I didn't know
as a kid, and he points them out. The things
that really stood out were Ma's intense reactions to the
Native Americans, who they call Indians in the book, and
he corrected the book. He said they should be called
Native Americans, and I said, good job, public school system
of Philadelphia. But he said, He's like, I just don't
(29:17):
understand why Ma hates them so much. And I asked him,
I was like, well, do you think that she would
be scared she was living alone Paul left them on
the prairie, and he said, yeah, he's like, I'd be
scared if any man walked into my house. She seems
specifically scared of these Native Americans. And I thought that
(29:41):
was interesting that he saw her whole reaction as so outsized.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
I love that Charlie spotted all that. It does speak
well of the.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Culture kids are growing up and now, because when I
was a kid, none of this flagged to me, except
that final scene, which I thought was absolutely bizarre. I
have to say when I read the rest of the books,
because Little House in the Prairie of the book is
the one that gets the most attention.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
It has the most overt racism.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
And so when I went back to reread the rest
of the books, that's where I was like, wait a second, we're.
Speaker 14 (30:12):
Going to continue the series, and so could you tell
me some more red flags that I have yet to encounter.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
The phrase you'll be as brown as an Indian is
repeatedly aimed at Laura when she's not wearing her bonnet,
including it being the final thing her family says to
her when she leaves home.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
To marry Almonzo, and.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
It's greeted as this like phrase of affection and things
like on the banks of Plum Creek, Laura writes it,
they're now safe from wolves and Indians. Like there's this
sort of persistent blending of Native Americans and as animals,
as animals, as animals, wildlife. It happens more than once.
It's not just that one phrase. There's also the phrase
(30:55):
I'm free white and American that.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Repeatedly comes up. I mean, on the one hand.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
That's the truth, right, Like, there is a truth to that,
but that truth is not what's being conveyed when that
phrase is used in these books. That phrase is being
used as like manifest destiny. I guess, a phrase of
total entitlement.
Speaker 14 (31:16):
A phrase of entitlement instead of a checking of privilege exactly.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
Like there's no there's no sort of like I'm free
white in American and therefore I can do what I
want unlike everyone else that currently is in this country.
It's really just like it is a total entitlement, Like
how dare you.
Speaker 11 (31:32):
I'm free white and American, so I deserve yep.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
You can't touch me.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
And then this really stood out to me I'd never
noticed this before.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
At the beginning of The Long Winter, Laura wants to.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Go help Paw in the field to harvest, and we're
told that Ma doesn't like to see women working in
the field.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Quote only foreigners did.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
That Ma and her girls were American above doing men's work,
and that when I read that, read that a couple times.
And part of the reason I think it never stood
out to me before is because by that point in
the series, we're so accustomed to dismissing Ma's racist views
as like, not as problematic, but as like annoying because
(32:17):
they're just keeping Laura from doing what she wants. So
it is never like, oh, this is a problem that
Mas says this because it's racist, it was a problem.
Goes like, oh, there's Ma. She doesn't want Laura to
have fun anymore, you know, And going back and seeing that.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
And just thinking like, oh wow.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
And then of course there's the entire chapter in Littletown
on the Prairie where there's a big blackface scene.
Speaker 11 (32:39):
Right, I have not gotten to that yet.
Speaker 14 (32:42):
And what I'm thinking, as you're going through all of
this is how do I talk to Charlie about these
things and about these issues because I think it could
be used as a way to teach history, to say
these our views that some people did have, this is
what we believe now, and as a way to show
(33:06):
him that sentiments evolve, right.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Yes, I mean, I can tell you as a kid,
I didn't know what blackface meant. And in the chapter,
I remember it as Pa putting shoe polish on his face,
and I just thought it was like a Halloween costume
to disguise himself, and Ma's big concern is that he
might have shaved his beard. Rose inserted this scene. This
(33:32):
never happened. So Rose intentionally inserted a blackface scene in
littletown on the Prairie that Laura.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Was okay with. That's not actually a reflection of.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
What actually happened, although it is absolutely a reflection of
the kind of entertainment that was happening, both at that
time and at the time the books were being written
in the thirties. But all of this, of course, without
any context for Glenna's age eight, is just a scene
in which we get to see Pau having fun and
Laura enjoying it in the town, having a party. And
(34:04):
when I went back and reread that chapter, it's breathtaking
in the worst possible way, and a lot of discussions
around the problems with the series. So much focus is
on the one book, but it's the fabric.
Speaker 11 (34:21):
It's endemic to the whole series, is what you're.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
Saying, woven in in a way that I think reflects
the degree to which it's woven in our storytelling. Like
it's just sometimes when we talk about Laura, it's like
she's a problem, and in understanding the degree to which
it is woven throughout the books, you're like, it's all
a problem.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
This is not just a problem of Laura.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Remember that parent who wrote to complain about the opening
pages of Little House. Here's the part of editor Ursula
Nordstrum's response that stood out the most to me.
Speaker 12 (34:58):
No one here the words read as they did. It
seems unbelievable to me that you are the only person
who has picked them up and written to us about
them in the twenty years since the book was published.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
In all those years, no one, including the people who
had published the book, had spotted the problem.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
But perhaps it's.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Not that surprising no one had noticed when you consider
the problem is everywhere.
Speaker 8 (35:29):
You know, blackface is entertainment, right, that was always the
problem that remains the problem.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
This is Lizzie Skarnick again that.
Speaker 8 (35:39):
People are like, ah, he loves these Confederate statues.
Speaker 9 (35:42):
We grew up with them.
Speaker 8 (35:44):
It creates a psychological hurdle that many people cannot get
over clearly. And I think Laura fans that it's like, wow,
you know, there's that Indian baby I wanted to steal.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
So God's great.
Speaker 9 (36:01):
And then you have this generation of.
Speaker 8 (36:03):
Children who want a papoos to think of Native children as.
Speaker 9 (36:07):
Dolls and not a little child. You know.
Speaker 8 (36:10):
You push together this coziness with you know, the decimation
of Native.
Speaker 9 (36:17):
Tribes, or with you know, the.
Speaker 8 (36:20):
Erasure and bigotry about black people, you know, and even
the marrying off of girls who are very young, and
you just have this confusing diet.
Speaker 9 (36:35):
But of course that's America.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Besides the beautiful descriptions and feelings of coziness, there's something
else going on in the books that discourages us from
questioning any part of what we're reading or someone else,
and that's Paw. We talked a lot in a previous
episode about reconsidering Paw with grown up eyes, and one
of those reconsiderations is under standing the role he plays
(37:01):
as the quintessential white savior. In Little House here's Rebecca
Tracter again.
Speaker 6 (37:07):
Paw is presented as the most humane in the family
and the person who is able to acknowledge, even in
very small ways, the humanity of the people who he's displacing.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Lizzie Skernick spotted it immediately.
Speaker 8 (37:22):
I was like, oh, this is another situation in which Pa,
as the white guy, gets to decide which Indians are
good Indians are bad Indians.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Doctor Rees notes that the so called good Indians are
always the ones who help the white people.
Speaker 7 (37:38):
Paw has a line where he says he tries to
rationalize what a good or a bad Indian is, and
the good Indian, according to Paw, is the one that
rides in to stop the other Indians from attacking the
little House on the prairie. So that's a good Indian,
(37:58):
according to Paw. So what are the ones that are
in the river bottoms? I guess they're bad Indians and
the only good Indian is a dead Indian. Applause is
to those ones, but not to the one who saved them.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
This happens more than once and by the shores of
Silver Lake, as the Ingles are crossing the desolate prairie.
They are set upon by threatening figures and then rescued
by a man named Big Jerry. Quote, everything's all right now,
PA said, that's Big Jerry.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Who's Big Jerry? MA asked. He's a half breed French
and Indian.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
PA answered carelessly, a gambler and some say a horse thief,
but a darned good fellow. Big Jerry won't let anybody
waylay us.
Speaker 9 (38:44):
Yes, he's a half breed.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
This is Lizzie Skernick again.
Speaker 8 (38:49):
So as a half breed, and what he is is
he's a half breed who protects all the white people,
and so his role is.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
To protect Pa. Here's how Big is described. He looks
like an Indian.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
He was tall and big, but not one bit fat,
and his thin face was brown. His straight black hair
swung against his flat, high bone cheek as he rode,
for he wore no hat. As a kid, I was like, great,
Big Jerry is here, Everything is going to be fine.
(39:24):
Paul likes him, and therefore I understand he's both safe
and probably fun.
Speaker 9 (39:30):
Of course, you love Big Jerry. He's like a hero,
but he's also kind of bad.
Speaker 8 (39:34):
But what's also so clear about Big Jerry is that
like he exists in the white world, you know, and
he's almost like pause representative in the camp, you know, pause,
not comfortable in like civilization.
Speaker 15 (39:50):
You know.
Speaker 8 (39:50):
He doesn't really like his job there, so he sort
of needs a heavy And that's Big Jerry.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
And his snow white horse wore no saddle nor bridle.
The horse was free. He could go wherever he wanted
to go, and he wanted to go with Big Jerry
wherever Big Jerry wanted to ride.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
The horse and the man moved together as if they
were one animal.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
As I said earlier, something else that stood out to
me on this reread is that Laura and or Rose
have a habit of aligning Native Americans with animals. I
say or Rose because Big Jerry is a fictional creation,
and of.
Speaker 8 (40:33):
Course Big Jerry again like totally made up story. I mean,
I think the idea is that that person did exist.
None of that ever happened, nor if it happened, it
happened very differently.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
And I think that's what we keep coming back to
that with all this context, it's easier to see that
it did happen very differently for everyone whether or not
they are actually included in the books. But having that context,
what do we do with it? How do we go
forward with Little House and Laura knowing all this? After
(41:07):
the break, we'll talk to doctor Reese again about how
she believes we should think about and teach Little House.
Speaker 22 (41:15):
I think they are a good book to use in
a college classroom. Get studies what we might call propaganda.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
So, now that we've taken a long, hard look at
what's in the Little House books, it's time to start
asking how should we be interacting with them, How should
we think about them, Should they be in schools at all?
Speaker 2 (41:44):
And if so, how should these books be taught.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
Doctor Reese believes the book should be approached academically.
Speaker 22 (41:53):
I think they are a good book to use in
a college classroom. Get studies what we might call propaganda
or our critical media studies, where you're looking very carefully
at perspective point of view, indoctrination.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Let's talk about propaganda for a minute.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Here's how the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines the word propaganda.
The spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purposes
of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.
Speaker 7 (42:28):
It is an indoctrination because it is asking us to
identify with a people that came onto native homelands and
took their lands and killed their families. But a lot
of Americans need that narrative in order not to feel
negatively about their own family histories here and.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
What they have today.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
We've talked about the ways that the Little Housebooks have
some complicated politics baked into them, from the Fourth of
July speeches to the heroic white settler head West fulfilling
some sort of divine mandate. And then there's Rose's connection
to libertarian ideology, and there is no question that the
libertarian fantasy Rose tried to weave through the Little Housebooks
(43:11):
falls under the heading of propaganda. We also know from
the first episode that The Long Winter was used as
actual American propaganda by General Douglas MacArthur in Japan. But
can we really call the full Little House series a
work of propaganda, or rather, is that the only thing
they are. I'm not convinced that was Laura's intention, nor
(43:34):
that the books would have lasted this long if that
had been their sole purpose. Rose very much intended for
her books to be tools of propaganda for her libertarian beliefs,
and her books, as we know, have not stood the
test of time. We do know, however, that the Little
Housebooks can and have harmed people who are not white.
(43:56):
But what if they were taught to children with some
of the context we've attempted to provide here. I asked
doctor Rees if she felt it would be enough to
teach the Little House Books critically to kids, or in
conjunction with books that describe the experience from the point
of view of a native child. But doctor Rees thinks
this wouldn't go far enough.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
When a book.
Speaker 7 (44:15):
Wins awards or is love, it is because of the writing.
In some way, it is beckoning to the reader. And
so when you try to ask someone to start reading
the book and then stop and think critically about that character,
you're doing this twist on their heart, their head, their emotions,
all of that. If your goal is to understand racism,
(44:36):
you don't need to do it using a book like this,
where you're asking kids to read it from cover to cover.
A professor friend of mine said, if you want to
teach racism and older books like that, just rip the
book apart. Give reading group number one, Chapter one and
the second reading group.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
Chapter two, Doctor Rees believes it's impossible to give these
books to children and expect them to understand the context,
even if it is provided.
Speaker 7 (45:02):
I think the harm is too great because it's not
just that harm, it's the context of larger, more widespread harms.
So it's just one more saying that Native children have
to endure, and it's one more thing that non Native
children go through that affirms those mistaken ideas that they
get just as a matter of life.
Speaker 11 (45:23):
In the United States.
Speaker 7 (45:24):
And why can't Native kids have stories that affirm them
like other people do, instead of having to deal with
that story in their classroom.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
Doctories advocates for Little House only having a place in
the college level classroom, which made us curious, what does
it look like when Little House is used in this manner?
Speaker 2 (45:45):
What is it like to encounter.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Little House for the first time as a grown person,
particularly for people from younger generations who have grown up
with a lot more resources and viewpoints than many of
us did. It turns out I would soon get an
answer to this question. While we were in the early
stages of making this podcast, I woke up one morning
(46:07):
to a series of messages on my phone from various
friends and even just acquaintances. They were all sending me
the same tweet that had gone viral. Here's what the
tweet said, did you read the Little House on the
Prairie books as a child, and if so.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
How old are you now?
Speaker 1 (46:28):
I'm teaching a class and none of the students have
heard of these titles, much less read them. I'm trying
to see when these books fell out of favor.
Speaker 3 (46:38):
So I just came home and threw up on Twitter,
like did you read these books? And if so, when,
because I kind of wanted to see maybe when they
stopped being popular.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
That's doctor Julia H.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
Lee, professor of Asian American Studies at You See Irvine.
She sent that tweet out not expecting such a huge response.
Speaker 3 (46:59):
I have a very small, small, small footprint on Twitter,
but I was shocked at the number of responses I got.
And I'm still getting responses almost two months later, So
over four thousand people responding I read the books when
I was this age. I never read the books, and
(47:20):
so it was just really really interesting to see how
many people wanted to talk about the books and their
experience reading them.
Speaker 1 (47:30):
On the one hand, the amount of responses Doctor Lee
received definitely proved the books are still as popular as ever.
On the other hand, the reaction was mixed. I would
say that more.
Speaker 3 (47:42):
People were like, I love them and I've passed them
on to my children, but there were I think a
significant number of people who said, I read the books,
but I'm not planning on passing them on to my
own children or to young people in my life, because
I realized now how problematic they are.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
Doctor Lee had sent out this tweet in the first
place because of an experience she had had in her classroom.
Speaker 3 (48:03):
I'm currently teaching a class that you see I called
the Asian American West, and one of the novels that
we're reading is by Linda Sue Park and it's called
Prairie Lotus and it's a Asian American retelling of Little
House on the Prairie.
Speaker 1 (48:18):
As part of the preparation, Doctor Lee assigned Little House
on the Prairie the book.
Speaker 3 (48:24):
And before we started talking about Little House, I always
ask my students this, how many of you've read this
book before?
Speaker 2 (48:31):
And none of the students.
Speaker 3 (48:32):
Raise their hand, which is quite common, but they kind
of looked at me funny. While I was asking this,
and I said, how many of you've heard of this
book before? And none of them had, none of them.
But I was really taken aback because these books have
been huge in my own childhood, and I had assumed
that the popularity still lingered.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
Once her students did read the book, they definitely had thoughts.
Speaker 3 (48:56):
I think it was really interesting to see it through
the eyes of my students, because they had a lot
to say about all.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
You know, it was a little bit of.
Speaker 3 (49:05):
I can't believe they let children read this, And their
analysis was really spot on, you know. They talked about
how not only the kind of representation of Native Americans
and the kind of the hateful rhetoric directed towards them,
but also the book's representation of gender and patriarchy and
kind of all of those things. And so I don't
(49:27):
think any of them would say, oh, yeah, this is
a okay I put on reading to my own children
or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (49:32):
Quite quite opposite.
Speaker 1 (49:35):
This got us curious had the Little House Books and
all their many problems, finally lost their broad appeal to
younger generations. In December, we went to a college classroom
where the Little House Books were being taught. We wanted
to try and dig deeper into this question. Lizzie Skirnik
allowed us to participate in her class at NYU on
(49:55):
historical fiction writing. The students had been assigned Little House
in the Big Wood and Little House on the Prairie.
There are about ten students in the class, and only
a few had read the books as kids. I think
it's fair to say the others were thoroughly unimpressed.
Speaker 23 (50:13):
I wasn't ever read these books when I was a child,
and I'm so happy that my mom decided not to
do that for me.
Speaker 11 (50:21):
It was kind of exciting to see what all the
hype was about. But then it turns out there's no hype.
Speaker 23 (50:28):
I think that so many kids that idolized and romanticized this,
why did they want to do?
Speaker 2 (50:35):
Nothing?
Speaker 16 (50:36):
Like?
Speaker 23 (50:36):
Why did they want to put on aprons?
Speaker 1 (50:40):
When the students moved deeper into their analysis of the books,
their thinking was very in line with everything we've been
talking about in the last six episodes, and the parts
they found the most disturbing could definitely be categorized as propaganda.
Speaker 23 (50:53):
I was thinking, while reading this, what haven't they written?
What histories haven't been written while reading this? And what
have we been like glazy over what other side stories
were happening. And I think as a child, I wouldn't
have liked this because I would think where am I
in this? And that's why I didn't enjoy it as much.
Speaker 21 (51:12):
I don't understand like why America would romanticize this period
after these books, because everything in the books it just
feels so traumatic and I don't know it.
Speaker 11 (51:27):
It's just so messed up.
Speaker 19 (51:29):
I did interact with these as a kid, and I
wasn't into it. I was like I was kind of warned,
not like not allowed to, but kind of like warned
against reading them by my mom because she was like
the racist straight up. And I was like a little kid,
like Okay, I'll take a look for myself. And like
(51:49):
you said, like it's it's it's hard to romanticize it
because it's like I'm not going to romanticize being a settler.
Speaker 16 (51:56):
I also think like it's like very concerning that the
global audience is influenced by this text of what American
history is or what the ideals of American self sufficiency
were and then be romanticized in this book series like
by a Little Girl is just sort of like it's
(52:16):
like the maple syrup on America.
Speaker 1 (52:18):
I was still thinking about doctor Reese's argument that the
Little House books should not be read to children in classrooms.
So I asked these students what they thought. Would these
be books you would give or suggest being read by
small kids, not like you have to.
Speaker 7 (52:34):
Like there is sort of in my family there was
like a this is like required reading to be a
little kid.
Speaker 2 (52:39):
But like it might not. I won't ban it from
a bookshelf, ye like, but not be like you must.
I would never give it to my child.
Speaker 24 (52:46):
I feel like it's just much more important at this
point to have more diversity, Like at this point, it's
like I'd rather that that the focus be on reversing
a lot of the harm that children's books have done.
Speaker 1 (53:00):
These days, kids have a lot of options when it
comes to what they want to read, even when it
comes to pioneer stories. Doctor Julia Lee remarked on how
much things have changed since she was a kid.
Speaker 3 (53:12):
Children's literature and young adult literature is so much richer now,
Like there's so many Like when we were kids, we
were reading probably Little House on the Prairie. We read
Ramona quimb Like you know, it was very like everybody
was kind of reading the same thing, and now I
feel like there's just so much representation that was not
(53:33):
my experience reading as a child. I never expected to
read about Asian people, Korean folks, anything like that.
Speaker 2 (53:41):
So I wasn't even looking. I didn't even know to
look for it.
Speaker 7 (53:44):
Like I just accepted like this was this was what.
Speaker 2 (53:47):
These were the types of characters that people read about.
Speaker 1 (53:50):
Maybe we're in a time where there's so many options
for kids, so many wonderful ways for them to see
themselves in writing and on screen. The Little House is
no longer necessy. This reminded me of something we had
heard in Just Met South Dakota when we talked to
the kids participating in the pageant there.
Speaker 2 (54:08):
I've actually never read the books.
Speaker 7 (54:10):
No.
Speaker 15 (54:12):
I worked at the Memorial Society for a while and
I had to read all the books, and did you
I mean, not my genre, but as a general book,
it's good.
Speaker 2 (54:25):
Fantasy, gay roman.
Speaker 1 (54:29):
When it comes to children's books series that offer alternate representation,
Louise Erdrich's Birch Bark House series is perhaps the most
well known, but we're going to list others. In the
notes to this episode, Doctor Reese also had some suggestions.
Speaker 8 (54:43):
Right now, I'm very keen, very high on Forever Cousins.
Speaker 7 (54:48):
It's a new picture book.
Speaker 22 (54:50):
And it's about these two little girls their cousins. They
actually live in the San Francisco Bay area, but why
are they there? And so in the authorish notes, the
author tells it about one of the government programs that
ask Native people to leave their.
Speaker 7 (55:03):
Homelands in seat up a life in a major city.
And so San Francisco has a huge Native community, and
so these little girls are part of that. So I'd
like people to just use books by Native writers, because
the author's notes that are in there that give context
to what this story is about are vital to undoing
or filling in what teachers did not get when they
(55:25):
were in school.
Speaker 1 (55:30):
So if we have all these other options, why does
Little House continue to have such appeal? In part, it's
for the reasons we've discussed. The coziness and the familiar
mythology are comforting to a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (55:45):
But we also have to recognize that the legacy of finding.
Speaker 1 (55:48):
Comfort in these stories has resulted in an enormous cultural
footprint that is very difficult to extricate from because it
is so comfortable. In the next few episodes, we're taking
a look at the enormity of that cultural imprint.
Speaker 2 (56:06):
Without question.
Speaker 1 (56:07):
One of the reasons Little House is so ingrained in
our culture is that somewhere in the world right now
you can turn on a television and watch the nineteen
seventies TV show that was based on the books. Would
the books even still be around if it weren't for
that iconic show? Do Laura and Rose owe their legacy
to the vision of one man and his rippling pecks
(56:30):
and shiny thick hair.
Speaker 2 (56:33):
Enter Michael Landon.
Speaker 1 (56:36):
For all of Rose's dreams of Little House as a
commercial for libertarian fantasy, even Rose could not have dreamed
up the Little House fantasy that emerged only a few
short years after her death. Next week on Wylder, We're
Going to Hollywood. Wilder is written and hosted by me
(56:58):
Glennis McNichol. Our story editors are Joe Piazza and Emily Meroanoff.
Our senior producer is Emily Meroanof. Our producers are Mary Doo,
Shina Ozaki, and Jessica Crinchich. Our associate producer is Lauren Phillip.
Sound design and mixing by Amanda ro Smith. Production help
from Asavay Sharma, Christina Everett, Julia Weaver and Abou safar
(57:23):
Our scene in additional music was composed by Elise McCoy.
We are executive produced by Joe Piazza, Nikki tor, Ali
Perry and me. If you're enjoying Wilder, please consider rating
and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (57:38):
It actually helps us out quite a lot.
Speaker 1 (57:40):
Thanks to Ronda in the Little House on the Prairie
Museum Outside of Independence, Kansas. Special thanks to Lizzie Skernick
and her wonderful class for letting us join their discussion
and sharing their.
Speaker 2 (57:50):
Thoughts with us.
Speaker 1 (57:51):
And thanks as always to doctor de Wi Reese who
was so generous with her time in scholarship. Thank you
as always to CDM Studios. Listen extensive resources in our
show notes on all the topics we've discussed in this episode,
as well as reading options for the children in your life.
You can also find our contact and go there if
you want to write to us with your own thoughts
and questions. Follow us on Instagram at Wilder Underscore podcast
(58:15):
and on TikTok at Wilder Podcast, where you can see
behind the scenes footage from all our travels.
Speaker 2 (58:22):
Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.
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