"Wilder is constrained, yes, by her own inability to truly know the Indian child, but she fights against those constraints."

This Little House of Mine
Rachel F. Seidman

Sitting in a coffee shop a few months ago I had another experience similar to my first jolt in the library. While the first one led me to question these stories' veracity, the second made me consider their politics. After I described my project to an acquaintance, she replied that she believed much of Wilder's emphasis on self-sufficiency and independence was a rebuttal to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. My heart sank as I recognized the plausibility of that claim. Despite my years of training as a historian, it had never occurred to me to think of the Little House books in the context of the Depression during which they were written. Indeed, according to Wilder's biographers, FDR's New Deal did not sit well with Laura, her husband Almanzo, or their daughter Rose. Although Democrats by dint of their longstanding familial affiliation, they referred to FDR as "a dictator" and disliked his programs as "far too powerful and meddlesome." Surely these feelings undergirded Wilder's attempts to show how her family survived without "hand-outs."

I don't like thinking of Wilder as an anti-New Dealer, but I find other charges still harder to stomach. That she was a racist, for one. While I accept that she shared in her culture's racist failings, I maintain that her views are complicated rather than simplistic. I disagree with those who, based on the claim that her works are harmful, call for censorship. In 1998 the Saint Paul Pioneer Press printed an editorial by Deborah Locke entitled "Cleaning 'House'" that claimed, "Laura Ingalls Wilder's children's books about a 'heroic' white settler family are filled with patently racist and absurd portrayals of Indians. Her series is utterly inappropriate for third-graders." The Osage writer Dennis McAuliffe Jr., in a book about his family's history, wrote "I would not want my child to read Little House on the Prairie. I would shield him from the slights [it] slings upon his ancestors."

I understand these charges. In Little House on the Prairie the Ingalls's neighbor, Mrs. Scott, voices the views of many settlers when she says that the land should belong to whites rather than Indians. "Land knows, they'd never do anything with this country themselves. All they do is roam around over it like wild animals. Treaties or no treaties, the land belongs to folks that'll farm it. That's only common sense and justice." Mrs. Scott, if not her creator, believed the old adage that the only good Indian was a dead Indian. There are several passages in the books where Indians are described as barbarous or animalistic. When Laura sees two Indians coming toward her and Mary as they play on the prairie, Wilder describes them as "naked, wild men," whose eyes were "black and still and glittering, like snake's eyes." Laura and Mary are terrified when they see the men enter the house and wonder, "Oh, what are they doing to Ma!"

But Wilder's attitude toward Indians is not one dimensional. In the scene above, Laura finally slips into the house to protect Ma and watches the two Indians from behind a slab of wood leaning against a wall. When one of the men spots her and their eyes meet, the description changes tone: his eyes "shone and sparkled at her." Shining and sparkling eyes are a familiar trope in the book, and usually describe those nearest and dearest to Laura, especially Pa. After the men leave, Laura remarks to her mother that they "smell awful." But Ma replies, "[T]hat was the skunk skins they wore." There is a recognition, at least, that the smell is not inherent in the people but comes from the clothing they wear.

Despite this one instance of clear-sightedness, Ma is indeed deeply frightened of Indians, and that fear leads her to dislike them. Implicit in Laura's description of Ma, I believe, is a critique. Clearly Ma, who scolds Laura for forgetting her sunbonnet because the girls are "getting to look like Indians," is afraid of what scholars today would call "otherness." But Laura also reveals how that fear depletes her and her family. In On the Banks of Plum Creek, the family buys a little spotted cow from a Norwegian couple who have named her "Reet." Laura gleefully figures out that the name means Wreath, for the rosy circles on her hide. Ma firmly and unimaginatively insists, "Her name is Spot." In describing this scene, Wilder lays bare her mother's ethnocentrism and shows how it blinds her to the poetry of life on the frontier.

Not only does Wilder implicitly criticize Ma's fear of Indians, she makes Pa speak up on their behalf, and describes Laura as fascinated by and attracted to them. Pa defends the Indians to Ma and their neighbors. When other whites accuse the local tribe of setting the prairie on fire to burn the settlers out, he reminds them that it is a traditional farming technique. He declares that Indians "would be as peaceable as anybody else if they were let alone. On the other hand, they had been moved west so many times that naturally they hated white folks." One of the most powerful moments in the Little House on the Prairie is near the end, as the Indians are leaving the area, and Laura for the first time sees a papoose. As her eyes lock with the child's, she cries, "Pa, get me that little Indian baby!" She is absolutely certain about her desire although she can't explain it except to sob, "Its eyes are so black." When Ma reminds her that they already have a baby Laura declares loudly, "I want the other one too!" Some will argue that this moment represents a romantic white appropriation of the Indian child. This may be so, but there is also a clear yearning for a crossing of boundaries, a desire to somehow connect with this other child, which compels the reader to recognize a message far more complicated than one of hatred. Wilder is constrained, yes, by her own inability to truly know the Indian child, but she fights against those constraints. Her story reflects a wide variety of white views on race and in that way offers a compelling portrait of both the richness and the tragedy of life on the frontier.