When Perspectives Shift
Re-reading American classics in 2023
According to PEN America, more than 50 groups with as many as 300 chapters across the country – chiefly one called Moms for Liberty – have organized to ban books in K-12 schools. Most of these groups formed in 2021, and they got to work fast. Nationwide, there were 2,500 banned titles in 2021-22.
By and large, books on banned lists include LGBTQ+ characters and/or characters of color. Many of these characters find themselves dealing with racism, poverty, gender, sexuality, or sex. They range from perennial lightning rods (Beloved) to newer narratives (Gender Queer: A Memoir) to the truly inexplicable (Everywhere Babies, a board book of… illustrations of babies and sometimes adults, which the Florida Citizen’s Alliance called “extremely age-inappropriate and pornographic”).
At the same time, there are separate efforts to remove books – usually older, contemporarily viewed as racist, stereotypical, or marginalizing – from required reading: To Kill a Mockingbird, Huck Finn, Of Mice and Men.
All over our pluralist, polarized, seething country we’re seeing debates over whether books should not be taught either because of “obscene” content or because their points of view perpetuate stereotypes. For some, the problem is a woke public school curriculum that indoctrinates students to immoral lifestyles and the belief that systematic injustices exist in America. For others, it’s a curriculum that offers an outdated telling of historical events and shuts down difference.
At Literary Citizen, we consider what fiction reflects about current politics. But what happens when fiction becomes the politics?
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Growing up in Kansas, my best friend’s household functioned very differently from mine. They had a two-story house with a piano and a large, always-full candy jar. In my house, that candy would have been run through immediately. Her family just… didn’t eat it. But what felt like the most important difference was that my friend’s mother – I’ll call her Sharon – pre-read all her books, sometimes rejecting them for content. I thought this was hilarious, and stupid. Every week my mother turned us loose in the Westlink library to fill canvas bags with as many books as we could carry, no questions asked. The summer I was 11, my mom ran the register at a bizarre pop-up that sold remaindered household items in a vacant big-box store. I spent many hours at this weird flea market cross-legged under folding tables reading gruesome and deliciously sexy Dean Koontz novels.
One of the more traditional books I read on my own was Little House on the Prairie, a fictionalized autobiography of the author, Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read the whole series, many times over. In the yellow box set I’ve carted around all these years, it’s clear which volumes I liked the most – On the Banks of Plum Creek, with its delightful sod house and run-ins with the odious Nellie Oleson, and Little Town on the Prairie, full of lively parties and sleigh rides with Cap Garland, which, after the glue holding the pages together gave out, had to be replaced. I loved Laura for her spunk and bravery and pioneer lifestyle responsibilities. When I was a kid, these were de rigueur reading for bookish little girls; Sharon surely signed off.
More recently, the Little House books have faced a reckoning over their depictions of Native Americans and African-Americans. In 2018, the American Library Association voted to change the name of an annual award from the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. For me, the question came up among friends a few months ago: Should we read the Little House books to our kids, or are they too problematic?
I cracked open the eponymous second book in the series, the one in which the Ingalls family settles in what the narrator calls Indian country but what was the Osage Diminished Reserve in Kansas. I found that I still loved all the things about the book that I did as a child. But as an adult in 2023, I can now track exactly how the book’s sympathies lie nearly fully with the white settlers, not with the people they are displacing. A particularly heartbreaking conversation between Laura and Pa goes like this:
“Will the government make these Indians go west?”
“Yes,” Pa said. “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 now. That’s why we’re here, Laura. White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick. Now do you understand?”
“Yes, Pa,” Laura said. “But, Pa, I thought this was Indian Territory. Won’t it make the Indians mad to have to—”
“No more questions, Laura,” Pa said, firmly. “Go to sleep.”
The problem for today’s readers is not necessarily that Pa’s character has said these things. Characters say and do many terrible things; literature is filled with villains. The problem is that these books don’t recognize Pa’s actions as villainous. He’s lionized, beloved. And those warm feelings extend beyond him to the broader pioneer movement. Charming Pa’s attitudes toward Indians and homesteading becomes part of the physical and emotional backdrop for the entire narrative, a basis for dramatic tension. His character effectively does the whitewashing of this part of American history for the series’ readers. In her 2018 Pulitzer-winning biography Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Caroline Fraser writes:
“The image of Charles Ingalls that emerges from these unsettled early years contains elements of moral ambiguity missing from the portrait his daughter would one day so lovingly polish… Having avoided fighting in the Civil War, he was not above trying to profit from it. Like many of his time, he did not hesitate to put a young and growing family in harm’s way… His dealings with Indians and implicit reliance on the government – to protect settlers from the consequences of their provocative actions and remove Indians from the land he wanted – were self-serving… These were very different characteristics than the ones his daughter would choose to emphasize decades later. She would never refer to him in print as a “squatter.” But she knew he was.”
This brief conversation between Laura and Pa is the extent to which the book questions Manifest Destiny. Pa presents the settlers’ point of view; consideration of another point of view is shut down. But when brought to light and examined closely, this exchange can be a jumping off point for today’s young readers to put the Ingallses and the Osage in historical context, to understand how that time led to this one.
***
In an interview, Louise Erdrich says that she didn’t start out writing a counter-narrative to the Little House books, but she’s glad it turned out that way. The Birchbark House series introduces us to young Omakayas and her Ojibwe family, who live on an island in what is now northern Wisconsin. We read about the same sort of detailed daily life as we do in the Little House books – building the summer birchbark house, hunting, sewing, preparing food for the winter. Close observers will notice strong similarities between Garth Williams’ Little House illustrations and Erdrich’s; she drew them herself, and they feel like a wink in our direction.
The Little House books tend to put a rosy spin on both the motivations for the Ingalls’ transiency and the family’s poverty. They also omit real-life tragedies – Laura had a brother, Frederick, whose short life and death doesn’t make the series. But in the Birchbark books, Erdrich puts it all out there. A deep fear of being displaced pervades the first book in the series. The community experiences the devastating, deadly consequences of smallpox.
If the Little House books offer a single, largely derogatory and dismissive view of Native Americans, the Birchbark series gives us a rich accounting of Ojibwe culture and politics while staring back at the encroaching settlers. In reading them together, our contemporary understanding of a terribly consequential period of American history is fuller, more complete. Instead of standing in the doorframe of the little house watching the Osage walk west, we’re now in that long line of people forcibly removed from our homes.
***
As a society we’re revisiting many things that were once acceptable. Monuments to confederate generals. Tales of America’s founding communicated only from colonists’ perspectives and not those of Native or enslaved people. Some call the outcomes of this reckoning cancel culture, but I have no interest in canceling the Little House books, or really any books.
Despite the best efforts of Moms for Liberty, most Americans – 8 in 10 – don’t believe books should be banned for taking a critical look at history and race. About the same majority doesn’t think books should be banned for political ideas they disagree with. Today more than ever there is pressure on us as readers to be critical thinkers and thoughtful teachers. In a broadly applicable statement, Roxane Gay, who has written of her early love of the Little House books, said this: “The [Little House] books just have to be taught in context, and the proper context, not revisionist context.”
As a parent, I find myself more sympathetic to Sharon than I thought I would be. I understand her desire to protect her child and promote a worldview. But instead of withholding books from my daughter, I’d rather hand her more. I’m still that kid in the library reading whatever I can get my hands on, and fortunately for both me and my daughter, there’s a lot to choose from.
As Laura Ingalls Wilder said in a speech: “All I have told is true but it is not the whole truth.” She likely was referring to all she’d left out of her story, what she invented and reimagined. We can see even deeper into her words, though. Wilder was telling only her own truth. We do ourselves well to read beyond it.