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The reenactment of Laura Ingalls Wilder's life at the Wilder Pageant in Walnut Grove, Minn., In 2002. (Courtesy of the Wilder Pageant Committee)
Laura Ingalls Wilder was about to have a prize named in her honor, from the Association for Children's Library Service, when in 1952 a reader complained to the publisher from "Little House on the Prairie" about what the reader has found to be deeply offensive about Native Americans.
The 1935 narrative of the pioneering family in search of unglazed and unoccupied land opens up on a character named Pa, inspired by Wilder's own father, who tells of his desire to "go where the wild animals are." lived without fear. "Where" the land was level, and there were no trees. "
And where "there were no people, only the Indians lived there."
The publisher of Harper's who received the complaint from the reader responded by saying that it was "unbelievable" for her that not a single person at Harper's had ever noticed, for nearly of 20 years, as the phrase seemed to imply that Native Americans were not people, according to a 2007 biography of Wilder by Pamela Smith Hill.
Yet Harper's decision in 1953 to change "people" to "pioneers" in the offending sentence was not enough to appease the critics of the following decades, who began to describe Wilder's depictions of life. Native Americans and some African-Americans. beliefs -destinated – as racist.
Now, after years of complaints, the Association for Children's Library Service, a division of the American Library Association, says it's voted Saturday to remove Wilder's name from the award. He had already cited "anti-native and anti-black feelings in his work" when he announced the Wilder price review in February.
The prize, reserved for authors or illustrators who have made "a significant and lasting contribution to children's literature", will no longer be called the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award". It is now the "Youth Literature Prize".
"This decision was taken into account that Wilder's legacy, represented by his corpus, includes stereotypical expressions of attitudes that are inconsistent with ALSC's core values: inclusiveness, integrity and respect. , and responsiveness, "said the association in a statement. his website.
Wilder was the first to win the award in 1954, while she was in the late 80's and was approaching the end of her life.
Until her death in 1957, she was loved for the semi-autobiographical children's books of the "Little House," novelistic versions of her family's adventures traveling the western border in their boxcar and her encounters with Native Americans.
Born just after the Civil War in 1867 and having experienced both the Great Panic of 1893 and the Great Depression in the 1930s, Wilder once acknowledged that "in my own life, I have represented an entire period of American history.
The cabin of the site "The little house in the meadow" is a re-creation built in 1977 by the parents of Bill Kurtis and Jean Schodorf. (Beccy Tanner / The Wichita Eagle via AP)
But according to critics, his family's intrusion into Native American lands, particularly in "The Little House in the Prairie", represented a whole period of abuse against tribes across America, justified by the white settlers' belief that Native Americans count as settlers on their own land.
The book includes several character statements saying, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." In 1998, an 8-year-old girl from Upper Sioux Reserve was so upset after hearing her mistress read the statement out loud in class . She returned home crying, causing her mother to unsuccessfully ask the school district to ban the book from her curriculum.
Elsewhere in the book, members of the Osage tribe are sometimes described as animal, notes the critic Philip Heldrich: In a scene, Wilder describes them as wearing a "leather thong" with "the hairy skin of a small animal "which hangs" Hard sounds "and" bold and ferocious "faces with" black eyes ". Although Laura's father takes a more tolerant view of Native Americans, his description of a "good Indian" is that of a "non-common waste".
The character who is Laura Ingalls' mother, Caroline Ingalls, is not subtle in her hatred towards Native Americans, repeatedly saying that she does not like them, even before she has them. met. As Critic Ann Romines wrote: "The Indians become a code for everything that seems to threaten the white life and sets what she wants for her daughters.
Yet, Caroline Fraser, author of "Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder," argued that the racial insensitivity in Wilder's book should not mean that children should not read it.
In a March column for the Washington Post, after the association announced that it was considering removing Wilder's name from the award, Fraser argued that the library's association "conjures up the vision anodyne of literature "against which she fought. the Bible has always been "universally embraced". "
"Every generation revises the literary canon.Although the answer to racism is not to impose purity retroactively or to make shelf titles disappear, no 8-year-old Dakota child should have to listen to a non-critical reading of "Little house in the meadow," she wrote.
But no white American should be able to avoid the story that he has to tell. "
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