Little House. Little Minds.
Oh look. They’re sanitizing history. Again.
Beloved children’s author Laura Ingalls Wilder just had her name stripped from a major book award because when she was writing in the 1930s she neglected to see the world through the enlightened prism of 2018.
What a fool she was, trying to tell tales of her post-Civil War childhood in the Midwest without first considering what we would think of her 80 years later.
Wilder was born in 1867, died in 1957 and is most famous for eight “Little House” books that chronicled her family’s hardships as they moved through Wisconsin, Missouri and Kansas.
Pity Wilder didn’t have the foresight to know that risk takers - like her parents - who rode covered wagons into the wilderness, lived in sod dugouts and buried their babies on the prairies would someday be regarded as white supremacists rather than settlers.
If only she'd cast her parents as villains.
Her family feared Native Americans - shhhh, Wilder called them “Indians” - because settlers were essentially at war with the natives. And for a time her family lived on what was about to become Osage land, before the treaty with the tribe was complete.
Sorry. It’s America’s story. Not all of our history is pretty.
This won’t end with taking Wilder’s name off an award, of course. Once books are slapped with a "racist" label the next step is to try to take the books off school reading lists and eventually library shelves.
(I checked that my daughter's old boxed set is complete so I can read them to my granddaughter someday. Hopefully she'll love the stories as much as her mother and I did.)
Woke progressives have long been on the warpath - oops, can I say that? - against Harper Lee and Mark Twain, for their use of racial slurs. Seems fewer kids every year are required to read “To Kill A Mockingbird” or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
Yet can any American who hasn’t read these two literary classics be considered educated?
I can answer that: No.