After Laura Ingalls

Today, February 7th, is Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 155th birthday. She is known globally as a beloved children’s author and chronicler of 19th century American pioneer life. Yet in recent years, the legacy of her Little House book series has becometarnished by claims of racism, due to the portrayal of native peoples. In perhaps the most dramatic example of this, in 2018 the American Library Association removed Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from its prestigious children’s literature award citing culturally insensitive portrayals in her books. Yet, as I reread these books critically, I find they may serve as fruitful lessons in the debates over difference and belonging now convulsing our diverse nation. As professor of American Indian Studies Amy Fatzinger shows, there is some evidence that Laura intended them to provoke such critical reflection, albeit within the perspectives of the time of her writing, now nearly 90 years ago.

While such debates over difference and belonging in the U.S. have a long history, the current polarization especially between Democrats and Republicans has taken the fight to new levels. Former president Trump took special interest in this fight, forming the 1776 Commission as a self-described patriotic counterpoint to the 1619 Project. Created by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones at the New York Times, the project re-narrates the history of the United States as fundamentally built not on noble ideals of freedom but on an economic model fundamentally based on the enslavement of Africans. Released to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans being brought to American shores, the project became caught up in a moment of national reckoning over racial injustice following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by Police Officer Derek Chauvin.

As Jamelle Bouie writes, the ferocity of Republican reaction to the 1619 Project signals that the formerly dominant white Christian Republican base now  feel on the defensive. In the last year alone, Republicans have proposed legislation in 37 states banning the use of materials from the 1619 Project and other such materials in public schools. But as Robert P. Jones shows in a recent article, the most extreme version of this trend is Florida’s SB 148 or the Individual Freedom bill that states: “Instruction may not utilize material from the 1619 Project and may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” It goes further to say that, in a clause clearly defending white people, ““An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.”

Despite their current reputation, I believe the Little House books might yet be of help as white people—and let’s face facts, that’s who is driving the Republican efforts—learn to be fruitfully uncomfortable with the truth of American history. For many white people, me included, the nation’s history has very personal threads running through our family stories. Both Laura and my great-grandmother Charlotte, Laura’s double cousin, were born in 1867 in Pepin, Wisconsin, movingly described in her first book in the series, Little House in the Big Woods published 90 years ago in 1932. The book, and the seven that followed, are a literal treasure house of American pioneer life and, surprisingly, music. Laura referenced 126 songs and tunes in all. They do all kinds of work in the books—helping bring life to scenes of a festive Christmas dance or a solemn Sunday afternoon. However, at times they also work to make the story more complicated, in just the sort of ways we need to be able to engage today. One instance of this is the song “The Blue Juniata.”

Just now, I am sitting, struggling to pluck out the song on my grandfather’s old Washburn bowl back mandolin. The Juniata (prounced “joo-nee-at-uh”) is a river in central Pennsylvania, and is likely derived from an Iroquoian word, Onayutta, meaning “standing stone.” The ballad is about the “Indian girl, bright Alfarata” and takes place along the namesake central Pennsylvania river, the Juniata. The river was, in fact, the site of major clashes between the Lenape who, driven from their homelands in and around present day New York and New Jersey, had settled on the other side of the Allegheny mountains along the Juniata. By the 1844s when the song was written, the Indian Removal Act (1930) and others acts of congress had forced the removal of the Lenape and other Eastern tribes, mostly to Indian Territory or what is now known as Oklahoma. Today, Oklahoma is home to 39 tribal nations, the legacy of the systematic removal that began in the 17th century with the arrival of English and Dutch settlers along the Eastern seaboard.

As I do research for a book on my family’s story, I’m trying to learn some of the songs referenced in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. I want to feel my way back in time, to feel the steel strings on my fingers, and hear the sounds resonating in my body, just as they would have 150 years ago when Laura describes Pa playing. In a crucial chapter, “The Tall Indian,” in her book The Little House on the Prairie, Laura describes the Indian path running right by their cabin. A tall, gentle Osage man visits, eating dinner and smoking a pipe with Pa before taking his leave. Ma worries, wishing the Indians would keep to themselves, but Pa asserts that he was friendly, and if they treat the Osage well, they’d not have any trouble. Later, after pulling their bulldog Jack out of the path where he was growling at an Osage man on his horse, Pa notes: “It’s his path. An Indian trail, long before we came.”

Then, in a last scene closing the chapter, Pa goes hunting and Ma and the girls unexpectedly find two Osage men at the door looking for food and supplies. Laura describes them as “dirty and scowling and mean”but after taking cornbread and tobacco, they leave. When Pa returns, he shows concern, but says “all was well that ended well.”  As usual, as Mary and Laura go to bed, Pa takes out his fiddle and plays, and Ma, rocking in her rocking-chair with baby Carrie, begins to sing softly. Remarkably, Laura, now in her 60s as she writes about this scene from her early childhood, choses “The Blue Juniata” to place on her mother’s lips. “Wild rov’d an Indian girl, Bright Alfarata, Where sweep the waters of the blue Juniata.” In an unusual move, Laura includes the lyrics of the entire song in the chapter because she new it to be among her father’s favorites. In fact, two years after publication, she noted in a letter to her daughter Rose that she’d found a notebook with the lyrics written out by her father, dated 1860, the year her parents married.

As the song ends with lyrics describing the voice of Alfarata borne away, Laura, still awake, raises a question, “Where did the voice of Alfarata go, Ma?” Ma answers, saying she supposes west, because that’s what Indian’s do. Laura, perplexed, pries further. “Why do they go West?” to which her mother says that they have no choice. Unsatisfied, Laura, ever curious, asks why again. Now, Pa chimes in to say, “The government makes them, Laura. Now go to sleep.” Her mind churning after the events of the day, Laura presses her luck and asks for one more question: “Will the government make these Indians go west?” Pa replies that yes, when white settlers come, the Indians have to move on, and the government would move these Indians west any time now. He boasts that when that happens, because they were here first, they’ll get the very best land. Laura, then apparently pressing too far, says, “But, Pa, I thought this was Indian Territory. Won’t it make the Indians mad to have to—-“ and Pa interrupts her saying firmly, “No more questions, Laura. Go to sleep.”

Certainly critiques of the book’s —and the chapter’s — portrayal of native peoples are warranted. She did in fact correspond with the Kansas Historical Society to understand more about the Osage people. But, for instance, in a chapter near the end of the book titled “Indian War-Cry,” Laura recounts laying awake listening to “that savage yipping and the wild, throbbing drums.” Her regular use of offensive terms such as “savage” and “wild” deserve strong critique, as does her regular claims of finding an uninhabited, empty, and thereby available land. the American writer and English professor Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa) calls “manifest manners,” a phrase coined to show how manifest destiny—the assertion that the whole of the North America belonged by divine right to the European settlers—is continued in literature and culture more broadly.

Yet, as I read it, Laura sometimes tutors a critical imagination in her intended audience of child readers. She was exactly right to say her family was on Indian Territory—in fact, squatting illegally on land even Pa admits belonged to the Osage “long before we came.” Pa was also correct in his sense that it would soon be opened to settlers. The Drum Creek Treaty of 1870 did indeed purchase the 8 million acre Osage Diminished Reserve in Kansas for $1.25 an acre, allowing the tribe to purchase land west of the Mississippi from the Cherokee in what is now Oklahoma, and allowing settlers to stake claims to the now available land. But by this time, Laura’s family were already on their way back to their little house in the big woods of Wisconsin. They had learned that the Swede, Gustaf Gustafson, had defaulted on the loan taken out to purchase of their Wisconsin farm, and likely could not have afforded the cost of staking claim to land in Kansas when it finally did become an option.

Marking Laura Ingalls Wilder’s birthday in the midst of such national rancor raises, for me, as a Christian minister and theologian, the question of how to live wisely with this legacy—as a citizen, and as part of her family. I wonder if, as I preached a few weeks ago in reference to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, the analogy of the body can help. One part of the body cannot say to another, I have no need of you. And, he continues, if one part of the body suffers, every part suffers with it. For too long, white Christian America has believed itself able to say to some parts of our national body, I have no need of you or your suffering.

For too long, some white people have said, I refuse be uncomfortable enough to actually learn the stories of violence in our shared history as a nation. And the evidence is that some of us at this moment are doubling down on that refusal. In lifting up ways this white history of pioneer life might actually invite readers into a fruitful discomfort about our history, I don’t mean to say that rereading the Little House series is all that is required. Too many of us white people are unfamiliar with native history, and our schools are being forced not to teach such critical facts to inform children to see the history in all its complexity. So discomfort, let alone fruitful discomfort, might mean setting Laura’s Little House books alongside something like Louise Erdrich (Chippewa) and her Birchbark House series, a coming-of-age story of an Ojibwe girl in Minnesota, or David Treuer (Ojibwe) and his magisterial overview of native peoples in North America, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee. But wisdom, I am coming to believe, means threading a middle path between the naive nostalgia of celebrating pioneer life, and the retribution of cancel culture that would simply put the series on a banned books list.

This past August I and my siblings buried my father on a windswept bluff above Shell Creek, Wyoming. The son of Western ranchers and pioneers, his family story is the stuff of American mythology. But as with any mythology, I’ve been learning the hard truth that the reality underneath the myth is more complicated. This thanksgiving, as American celebrates the 400th anniversary of that mythological “first Thanksgiving,” I’ve been rethinking my family story.

We buried my dad just feet from his parents May and Alois, and a stone’s throw from his grandmother, Charlotte, born in 1867 in the big woods of Pepin, Wisconsin where she grew up playing alongside her famous double cousin, Laura Ingalls. My childhood was shaped by stories of a pioneer family, one with Puritan roots that extend all the way back to Richard Warren who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620 and was a signer of the Mayflower Compact. Like many children, I loved the Little House books and the television series loosely based upon them. Yet when we visited family in Wyoming, I felt like I was literally stepping into the story and playing a part.

On visits to my Grandma May during the summer, I vividly remember marching in Greybull’s Days of ’49 Parade decked in cowboy boots, a hat, and my cap gun slung around my waist. I spent hours mesmerized by my Uncle Jim and Aunt Viola’s glass display case with rows and rows of arrowheads found on their ranch. In an ironic twist due to my dad’s job in Bethesda, Maryland, we always cheered on the Washington Redskins, and never with more ardor than the annual Thanksgiving weekend clash with the Dallas Cowboys.  In my childhood imagination, parading as a cowboy, wanting an arrowhead for my very own, and cheering on the Redskins against the Cowboys all was disconnected from current realities of native peoples in America. I simply didn’t know any, nor did my family stories or classroom lessons offer me anything different.

Though I can’t pinpoint a specific moment of conversion, I’ve dramatically changed my views on my family story, and the story of this nation. I now cheer Washington’s dropping of the name “Redskins” from their name. Founded as the Boston Braves in 1932, they changed to the Redskins the following year. Their original fight song, sung after touchdowns, included a parody of native speech: “scalp ’em, swamp ‘um; we will take ‘um big score.” Such disrespectful parody continues with sports teams across the nation, perhaps the most prominent example being the world series winning Atlanta Braves baseball team whose fans are encouraged to gesture with the “tomahawk chop” accompanied by a supposed “war cry” chant. In her third novel, Little House on the Prairie, detailing the family efforts to stake a claim in “Indian Territory,” Laura Ingalls Wilder dedicates an entire chapter to the “Indian War-Cry.” As she lays awake listening to “that savage yipping and the wild, throbbing drums,” Pa sat up making bullets by the fire “till he had used up the last bit of lead.”

I’ll never forget the phone call I had a few years ago with native scholar George “Tink” Tinker (Osage), now Professor Emeritus at Iliff Seminary in Denver. I had called to share the news that he had been named the recipient of an award offered by the seminary where I worked at the time. In the course of the conversation, I told him of my relation to Laura Ingalls Wilder, and there was a long, awkward silence on the other end of the line. I don’t recall exactly what he said next, but he shared how painful the book Little House on the Prairie is for him, and described his use of it in his courses over the years as an example of the racism endemic towards native peoples in America. It was actually his own people whose songs Laura describes as “savage yipping.”

Reflecting on her work in a speech at the Detroit Book Fair in 1937, Laura wrote “I realized that I had seen and lived it all—all the successive phases of the frontier, first the frontiersman, then the pioneer, then the farmers and the towns. Then I understood that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history.” What I am coming to understand is Laura—and my family—only represent one side of a whole period of American history. To tell a truer version of our own story, we need to listen to and learn from other sides of the story, including the kind of stories native voices like George Tinker are telling today.

As my family began the drive west from Minneapolis on our way to Wyoming last August, we intentionally began the trip at Owamni, the inventive and beautiful new restaurant by Sean Sherman, the self-named Sioux Chef. We sat at an outdoor table with a gorgeous view of the falls on the Mississippi that the Dakota people called Owamni (whirpool), the namesake of Sherman’s restaurant, renamed St. Anthony Falls by Father Louis Hennepin in 1680 in honor of his patron saint. Sherman’s simple yet profoundly influential concept is to revive the foods of indigenous peoples before European contact.

It has been fifty years since Wamsutta (Frank James), the then leader of the Wampanoaog nation, stood on Cole’s Hill overlooking Plymouth Harbor and the Mayflower to give a speech telling the uncomfortable truth of the first Thanksgiving. On that 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims, including my ancestor, the committee who had invited Wamsutta to give a speech rejected his words as “inflammatory” and “out of place.” In fact, he was simply naming the truth: the only factual part of the myth of the first Thanksgiving is that those Pilgrims would not have survived without the food supplied to them by the Wampanoag people. Since that day, native groups have kept “Thanksgiving” as a “National Day of Mourning.”

The United States poet laureate Joy Harjo (Cherokee) writes in the introduction to an anthology of Native Nations poetry, “Our existence as sentient human beings in the establishment of this country was denied. Our presence is still an afterthought, and fraught with tension, because our continued presence means that the mythic storyline of the founding of this country is inaccurate.” For the past couple years, the congregation I serve in Brooklyn has been praying for the Lanape peoples, lamenting their violent removal from the land upon which we live, work and worship, and seeking God’s blessings upon their leaders today. The church itself is in a neighborhood, Gowanus, named for Gauwane, a leader of the Canarsee band of the Lenape. My commitment this Thanksgiving—and one for the congregation I lead—is taking on learning the other sides of the story, complicating our white European founding myths.

The night before we buried my dad, we pulled out an old green wine bottle with masking tape over the cork and a label that said: ’82 Dandelion. Ever the pioneer, my grandma May made her own wine—grape, and, surprisingly, dandelion. My dad had picked this tradition up, making his own version of the stuff in our basement. I’m not sure if this bottle was from dad or grandma, but we were pretty sure it was going to be vinegar after all these years. We’d brought it to pour on the grave, honoring dad’s memory and all our ancestors buried there. But that night, when we tasted it, to our great surprise, it was good—very good. The next day, we each took a good swig before pouring it on the ground now holding dad’s ashes, saying our few heartfelt words of remembrance under an endless expanse of blue sky. I wonder if some people of European descent in American simply don’t want to know a more truthful version of our history because they expect it only to be sour, a distasteful exercise they would rather avoid. My experience, however, is quite the opposite. Like the ’82 dandelion wine, digging into a more truthful American story is actually very good, good in the moral sense, because in such truth-telling, we open a way forward that is better for us all.

In my first post opening up this history of trauma for native peoples in the US and Canada, a history to often intentionally forgotten by the dominant white settler culture, I described learning about the Pipestone Indian School in southwestern Minnesota, and the roots of this model in US government policy starting with the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. This school, founded by Captain Richard Henry Pratt in 1879. According to the history told in Denise K Lajimodiere (Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa), Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable, and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors, Pratt’s theory of “civilizing the savage” began as an experiment with Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche and Kiowa prisoners at Fort Marion in Florida. Convinced that assimilation was the path forward, he revised the slogan popular in the west–one repeated by Laura Ingalls in her third novel, Little House on the Prairie–“the only good Indian was a dead Indian” (p. 211)

Pratt’s boarding school model was founded on this revision of the slogan: “all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” On-reservation schools that allowed students to return to their families were a failure, in his eyes. The solution was to remove Indian children to off-reservation boarding schools ensuring they would be “thoroughly Christianized, individualized, and republicanized.” His school in Pennsylvania became a model for over 350 similar schools, many run by Catholic and Protestant churches who were paid by the government for this task. Jeffery Hamley, in Cultural Genocide in the Classroom, summarizes the goal differently: “a large-scale and complex system of schooling unrivaled in American education for what it attempted to accomplish: the destruction of tribal cultures as a means to assimilate Indians into the lower levels of American society.” The schools, patterned on harsh military discipline, involved classwork in the morning and manual labor in the afternoon–farming for boys, and domestic work for girls.

In Kent Nerburn’s follow-up to his moving Minnesota-based book encountering a Lakota elder named Dan in Neither Wolf nor Dog, he reconnects with Dan at the end of his life and helps him in his quest to find the final resting place of his sister, Yellow Bird. Early in the book, Dan recounts the day when white men pulled up in a car, and his father tried to hid the children. His sister, fearing for her doll, ran towards the house and was taken by the men there to remove the children and place them at a boarding school. Dan recalls begging his father to let him go, to try and protect his sister. His father said, “The white man’s world is very strong, but it has no heart. You are my son. i don’t want to lose you to that world. I don’t want you to be like one of those boys who goes to the white man’s school and comes back calling elders “savages” (34). Yet Dan made his case, and earned his father’s blessing to go, seeking to find and protect his sister.

Later in the book, Nerburn narrates the scene when Dan finds an abandoned railway station where all those years ago, Dan and his parents were to have met Yellow Bird after being sent on the “Outing program” pioneered by Pratt at Carlisle, in which boarding schools kept students for the summer and “leased” them out to white families as menial labor. She did not get off the train at the station, and they never saw her again. Leaning against the broken down station, Dan recalled:

“When I got to that boarding school, I was really scared. I had this eagle feather. An old man from our village had given it to me so I’d remain strong. He’d earned it when he was young. He said he’d been saving it his whole life to give to someone, and that I was the person the creator had wanted him to give it to.”

“When I got to that school, the first thing the priests did was take that eagle feather and break it up. They just tore it up right in front of me. They broke it up and threw it on the ground. From that moment, I hated that school . I knew it was bad for my spirit. But I was there for Yellow Bird.”

” I fought everything they did…but when none of that stopped me, they stared punishing Yellow Bird…I hardly ever got to see her. They kept the boys and girls separated. Sometimes I’d see her outside on the playground, and she’d try to run to me. She’d be crying, and they’d grab her and hit her” (p. 137).

This is the horror of my Christian legacy and the US Government policy. Tomorrow, a story about how this legacy is playing out with a Yerington Paiute youth fighting against the boarding school legacy with every step he takes. And Thursday, the National Day of Mourning, a reflection on what white people might do in rethinking this history of state-sponsored forgetting of the horrors upon which this nation and its mythic “Thanksgiving” is based.