I watched the new Netflix adaptation of Little House on the Prairie, and while I think it’s fine if people enjoyed it, I think making this show was deeply irresponsible.
(TW: woke ranting about settler colonialism)
Let me say first that I enjoyed Anne with an E, and I think that show was responsibly made. The 19th C Presbyterian moralizing was in some ways replaced by modern progressive moralizing, but I think it was a cute enough show that heavy handed moral messages don’t detract from its being enjoyable, and I think that the morals it promotes are good.
But I don’t think doing the same thing with Little House on the Prairie works. Anne of Green Gables is about not fitting in but finding a place for yourself while growing up. Little House on the Prairie is part of our national mythology about the violent settler colonialism our nation was founded upon.
This show tried to make Laura's family a lot more sympathetic to the Indigenous people and added some Black characters (one of whom was a known historic figure in Independence who delivered baby Carrie, but was only barely in the books). I think it's the relations with the Osage that are strikingly unrealistic though—in the part of Wisconsin where the Ingalls family lived before and after their time in Kansas, there had recently been some pretty major wars with the Indigenous population. And then they moved into unceded land. They had to be prepared for war again. The genocide our country inflicted on the Indigenous people was done through battles and government policies created because of the westward expansion of people like the Ingalls. This isn’t to say that the Ingalls—or any of my ancestors who moved west in early waves of white settlers—were settling there because they were genocidal. Most of them, definitely including the Ingalls family—were extremely poor and moved west out of economic desperation and a hope for a better life for their families.
And yet, it is nearly impossible to imagine a white settler family befriending a local Osage family the way the Ingalls family did in this Netflix adaptation.
I generally think that people acquire their beliefs through their actions rather than vice versa. People acquire beliefs because of how they act and then they strive to lessen cognitive dissonance (reverse of the Benjamin Franklin effect). Therefore, actively doing settler colonialism—arming oneself against the Indigenous people and hoping the government takes their land and gives it to you—makes one see the Indigenous people as inhuman more than having dehumanizing beliefs makes someone do settler colonialism. If you live in constant threat of war with your neighboring communities, you will inevitably see them as a cultural threat. So Ma's attitude in the books of constantly needing to differentiate her family by aggressively pursuing western customs and always wearing sunbonnets to keep their skin fair... is sort of the natural consequence of the situation the government and railroad companies created of pushing people west with empty promises of free land that was actually unceded, and pretending that she would have been as friendly towards the Osage as she was in this series is not realistic.
This is added to the fact that the basic plot of the books was heavily edited to support Rose Wilder Lane (Laura’s daughter)’s political agenda. She was one of the founders of American libertarianism and wanted to support a narrative of self-reliance without any government interference. The books portraying as the family venturing farther and farther west because Pa wanted adventures are misleading when, in fact, they were doing it to escape their debts.
Some of the edits, of course, were because the books were for children, and many things that happened in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood were not suitable for children. There’s a gap of like four years between On the Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake because the period was extremely traumatic for the Ingalls family. There was a baby who died at under a year; there was Mary's illness; there was a brief period in Iowa where Laura worked in a hotel (when she was like 11, and it sounded like a very unsafe environment from what I’ve read); her family couldn't pay off their debts so they left Iowa secretly in the middle of the night. At this time, I believe their family was so poor that another family actually suggested they could BUY Laura. I understand that this should be left out and isn’t something that needs to be portrayed in children’s media.
But frankly, I’m not sure what of the gruesome reality of settling the West SHOULD be portrayed to children. Teach them to make cornhusk dolls and churn butter and show them how log cabins were built—but I don’t know if we should read them Little House on the Prairie. The other books in the series aren’t as bad—LHotP definitely has the most problematic line in all of those books: "there were no people, only Indians". (Laura herself was talked to in her lifetime about that line and changed "people" to "settlers".) It's also, I'm pretty sure, the only time they're living on unceded land. So the books before and after that time aren't as bad; they’re more just about all the domestic chores they needed to do in daily life and interpersonal dramas.
But I think making a Netflix show about it that in some ways sanitizes the moral stain that necessarily effects people perpetrating settler colonialism was irresponsible.
I think it’s telling that in the 80s, they called the TV show by the title of the most famous of the books, but it took place in Minnesota, where the Ingalls family lives in the third book: On the Banks of Plum Creek. And then this modern series actually shows this book's contents, and it tries to make it acceptable for a modern audience (give Laura an Osage friend, has Ma teach her at home with Laura and Mary, show the historical Black doctor who saved their lives who's barely in the books, make Ma stand up against racism when she was in fact extremely racist in the books)… and I don't know what to do with it. I think that the actual family's attitude towards Indigenous people in the books is hard for me to grapple with, because Ma was more explicitly, grotesquely racist than Pa and Laura, but the latter were the ones who wanted to keep moving west, doing the dirtiest work of settler colonialism. I want there to be a character whose worldview I can see as better than the others, but I don’t. I loved those books as a kid and I’m fascinated by how they were written. But I don’t think that they can be sanitized without seriously misleading people about the nature of American history.
