A local school district is rethinking whether Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books are appropriate for elementary students after the Wisconsin author’s name was removed from a national children’s award due to racist stereotypes in her books.
In late June, the American Library Association’s Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) changed the name of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. In explaining the decision, the group stated that Wilder’s work about homesteading settlers moving West “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness.”
On July 1, Rainey Briggs, director of elementary education for the Middleton-Cross Plains School District, emailed teachers: “Please take a few minutes to read this article and if you still have any of Laura’s books let’s pull them and have conversations as teams to break down the offensiveness that resides and remove!,” he wrote, including a link to a Washington Post article about the controversy.
In an interview, Perry Hibner, spokesperson for the school district, clarified the email’s intent, saying that “pulling” the books referred to “pulling them out” to examine offending passages.
“I think this is going to be happening a lot more frequently now where we look at [traditional children’s] books in a whole new light,” says Hibner. “We can’t be afraid to have difficult conversations and make difficult decisions. It isn’t about censorship; it’s about creating an environment where all of our students feel safe.”
Several passages in Ingalls Wilder’s books show characters expressing bias toward Native Americans and African Americans.
Little House in the Big Woods, the first of the nine-book series, originally published in 1932, begins in Pepin, Wisconsin, where the Ingalls’ family cabin is now a museum and still hosts an annual festival. In Little House on the Prairie, Laura’s father talks of his
Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in Pepin County, Wisconsin. Her books chronicle her family’s homesteading life.
dreams of moving West, to a place where “...there were no people. Only Indians lived there.” The publishers changed “people” to “settlers” in editions published after 1953. At one point, the Ingalls’ neighbor, Mr. Scott, says, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” This passage, read aloud in class by a teacher on the Upper Sioux Reservation in Granite Falls, Minnesota, in 1998, caused an 8-year-old girl to go home crying. Her mother unsuccessfully petitioned to ban the book from the curriculum. In another passage in the Little House series, a group of male settlers dons blackface to perform a minstrel show.
“There are people who say that’s a reflection of the time, but children who are reading it today aren’t reading it in that past time,” says Kathleen Horning, director of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at UW-Madison’s Library of the School of Education. Horning is also active in ALSC and a member of its parent organization, the ALA.
In many ways, the tales of Ingalls Wilder and her homesteading family are thought to be historically accurate, though embellished, accounts of the lifestyles of settlers at the time. Members of the family hunt deer, make maple syrup, go to school, farm and keep livestock.
None of Ingalls Wilder’s books are part of the Middleton school district’s formal curriculum, yet they might be on the shelves in classroom and school libraries. The district says it will include time in weekly meetings for groups of teachers to discuss the questionable content when the school year starts. These groups, called “personalized learning communities,” will make recommendations to the district on how to proceed, Hibner says.
A popular alternative to the Little House books is The Birchbark House series by Louise Erdrich, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Published in 1999 and based in Madeline Island in Northern Wisconsin, the books tell the story of an Ojibwe family and community that are forced to interact with encroaching settlers while trying to maintain their traditional lives.
Officials at the Madison schools have not made any decisions regarding the presence of Ingalls Wilder’s books in libraries and classrooms. “We haven’t had a formal discussion around it, but these books aren’t currently on our list of recommended texts for teachers aligned to standards,” district spokesperson Rachel Strauch-Nelson wrote in an email to Isthmus. “Our curriculum and instruction department, and our Native American teacher leader consider texts that we recommend, along with potential discussions that would help students be critical thinkers when it comes to those texts.”
