Little House on the Prairie Redux

I just finished reading Little House on the Prairie on my own for the first time.  My mother read it to me and my sisters (the ones that were born by then) when we were very small in the early 1980’s. As I read this book, some core memories were triggered in my mind from my early childhood. For example, I was taken back in time, reading about the Ingalls girls walking around bare feet in the high grass. I remember doing that myself at that age. We lived in a country town in central Pennsylvania, and we had Amish neighbors that reminded me of pioneers, so it all the setting felt real for me. Our Amish neighbors plowed their fields with maybe a similar plow to the ones that Pa Ingalls bought in the big city of Independence. I could picture myself in that setting.

Also, we watched the show on television at that time, and my mother sewed us flannel nightgowns and bonnets with a believable, pioneer-type print that was white with little red buds on it. My sisters and I were big fans of the show and the pioneer girl aesthetic (well, as much as a 2,4-, and 6-year-olds can be fans of an aesthetic). The descriptions of building the cabin that the Ingalls’s lived in influenced my feelings about cabins and log homes well into adulthood (I bought a log bed once at an auction that I never got to use). I was a child who liked building log homes with Lincoln Logs, and I think this part of myself was influenced by my young experiences with this book.

However, wow, I did not realize how much an anti-Native American perspective permeates this book. I do not know if my mother just did not read those parts to us. It is possible that my mother skipped those parts. It is also possible that at the time she did read them, and I just did not understand any of those parts. A neighbor, Mrs. Scott says at one point in the book, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”. I also think some of the anti-native American sediment was present in the show, but again, I don’t know if that resonated me at all. We were very young when we wanted to be Little House girls. It was before I started kindergarten.

Recently, I read this book for a community college class that I am teaching. That as the impetus for me to re-examine this book.

I know that Little House on the Prairie was based on the childhood memories and experiences of the author Laura Ingalls Wilder. I have also tried to approach this book from the perspective that this book was written in 1932, which was 94 yeas ago. The events in this book took place at least 150 years ago. Wilder did not start writing these books until she was in her 50’s and Little House, the 3^rd installment of her series, was published when she was 68 years old.

Recently, in the book club that I belong to, we read 75-year-old book. One of the members reminded us not to let the idea of Historical Bias cloud our thinking whenanalyzing older works. Historical bias “involves judging historical actors, practices, and events using modern-day morals, values, and knowledge” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

I must remind myself I am reading this book with 2026 a perspective. Still, the descriptions of Native Americans in this book are jarring. I wouldn’t tell a young person who was interested in this book not to read it, but I would give them some background and maybe I would suggest another book that they could read as pairing for this book.

I found this reading to be very interesting because for me it was like traveling back to the early 1980’s again. There were images in the book that I really chewed on for a long time in my youth, and I forgot about them until I read this book this past week. For example, when the Ingalls family was building their house, something fell on Pa and he hurt his ankle. I remember thinking about that as a small child. Sometimes I would act that part out. I also remember the fires that they had on the prairie. My father had a side-hustle as a chimney sweep, and I always had a fear that our chimney would catch on fire like the Ingalls’s did in the book or that a fire would come out of the high grass that was near our house like it did on the prairie in the book.

In the book, there is a part where the whole family gets malaria and almost dies. The neighbor who is nursing them back to health tells them that they got sick because they ate watermelons from the creek bed. As a child, I pondered that one a lot and was convinced that could really happen. I remember eating watermelon with an air of suspicion for while and wondering if it would make me sick too.

In summation, it was an interesting journey for me to read this book as an adult. I had a complicated mix of emotions.

Have you ever revisited something that was a core part of your childhood experience as an adult? How was your experience?