https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/library-association-removes-laura-ingalls-wilder-from-book-award/
Who’s next? Mark Twain, Shakespeare, Hemingway?
Politically correct radicals are now beating up on Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of the beloved “Little House on the Prairie” children’s books, which inspired a long-running TV series starring Michael Landon that ran from 1974 to 1983.
The Association of Library Services for Children, a part of the larger American Library Association, has unanimously voted to strip Wilder’s name from a prestigious book award it has given since 1954. The reason? “Wilder’s legacy, as represented by her body of work, includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness.”
To its horror the group notes that Wilder’s novels include “statements by white characters portraying Native Americans as dirty, lazy, and dangerous.”
The example that almost every Wilder critic cites is this passage in book she wrote in 1935:
There the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see, and there were no people. Only Indians lived there.
Every other example simply reports on the attitudes of one character or another on Native Americans.
What the critics often don’t note is that Wilder was mortified when, before her death in 1957, a reader pointed out the passage to her. Wilder promptly wrote her publisher:
You are perfectly right about the fault in Little House on the Prairie and have my permission to make the correction as you suggest. It was a stupid blunder of mine. Of course Indians are people and I did not intend to imply they were not.
