07/15/2025
In the late 1990s, a scholar, Waziyatawin Angela Cavender Wilson approached the Yellow Medicine East school district after her daughter came home crying because of a line in a book, first attributed to Gen. Phil Sheridan, but a common saying by the time: โThe only good Indian is a dead Indian.โ Her story gained national attention.โWhen the book is given a critical reading, it becomes quite clear why an Indigenous child would walk away with feelings of shame, hurt and embarrassment,โ Waziyatawin writes. โThere are literally dozens of derogatory, dehumanizing and damaging messages.โ
The Ingalls family were people of their time and place. In the words of Laura June Topolsky writing for The Awl, that meant they were โManifest Destiny personified.โ But theyโre also the characters at the center of a beloved childrenโs series, one that new children continue to discover all the time.
The third book, which has the same name as the series, Little House on the Prairie, takes place when the Ingalls family settled on the Osage Diminished Reserve from 1869 to 1870. โThe Ingalls family arrived in Kansas with a large tide of other squatters in the summer and fall of 1869,โ writes Penny T. Linsenmayer in Kansas History. In the end, they moved on after federal troops threatened to remove them and other illegal settlers from Osage land, she writes.
She believed white people had a right to the land, writes Laura Ingalls scholar Amy Fatzinger. She quotes Lauraโs Pa from the text:
"When white settlers come into a country, the Indians have to move on. The government is going to move these Indians farther west any time now. Thatโs why weโre here, Laura. White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick. Now do you understand?"
Topolsky writes about beginning to read the series to her own daughter and realizing flaws she hadnโt when she was first reading them as a child. She stops reading them to her daughter. โThese books are a fascinating and incredibly flawed version of a series of events that actually occurred, remembered through the eyes of a small child, and written in the 1930s,โ she writes.
From left: Carrie, Mary and Laura Ingalls in what is the first known photo of the sisters, taken about 1879. Carrie is believed to be wearing a string of Native beads.
Photo from Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum in Mansfield, Mo.
