Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
May 2000
Abstract
Since its first printing in 1935, Little House on the Prairie has been a perennial favorite among countless readers. The Little House series itself ranks consistently as one of the most commercially popular of all times. However, Little House on the Prairie, the second book in the series, has become the center of numerous controversies. Yellow Medicine East School District, in Granite, Minnesota, which serves a portion of the Upper Sioux Community of that region, stopped class reading of the book, citing disgust with the text's portrayals of Native Americans. Such action follows a similar banning of the text in 1993 in Sturgis, South Dakota. While the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union has sought to stop the ban in Yellow Medicine's classrooms, the controversy about the "racist" depictions of Native Americans in the text continues. While no critic denies that Indians in the book deeply affect the Ingalls family in a variety of ways, critical opinions vary concerning each character's feelings about the Indians encountered. This "Indian predicament," as Charles Frey acknowledges, is "difficult to judge." From Ann Romines, who sees the Ingalls women as a "colonial outpost of Anglo-American propriety on the Great Plains," to Native American Michael Dorris, who feels personally offended by Ma's attitude toward the Indians, critical reception is at best mixed. As the book continues to be read by children across the world, and as awareness to the racial depictions of ethnic peoples in American literature necessarily continues to generate concern, a greater understanding of characters' attitudes toward the Indians in Little House on the Prairie should help educators in teaching this classic to future generations.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 2 (Spring 2000). Published by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Copyright © 2000 Center for Great Plains Studies. Used by permission.