Erasing History

For those who haven't heard, Laura Ingalls Wilder has apparently committed the horrible sin of being born in a different time and in an era that wasn't sufficiently woke enough.  Her Little House On The Prairie books have been a boon to children for generations, introducing youngsters, mostly girls, to the frontier of the late 1800s.  Millions of children learned to love reading based off of Wilders' books.  She was so impactful that there was even an award for children's literature given by The Association Of Library Services For Children that had her name on it.

Not anymore.

Apparently Wilders had some unflattering stereotypes in a few of her books, and the powers that be thought that this was too much to give an award named after the author for.  A lot of Wilders' work portrayed Native Americans in a bad light.  It obviously couldn't have been that, since told from the viewpoint of settlers, many of that time had a poor view of Native Americans, or that attitudes change from era to era.  Nope, Wilders was now an awful bigot who must be expunged from history.

Folks, this is getting out of hand.  One of the offending passages of pone of the novels reads: "There the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see, and there were no people. Only Indians lived there."  It's horrible as she seems to imply that Indians are not people.  However, as anyone familiar with the passage and Wilders' work knows, Wilders herself was horrified when she discovered what people took from the passage and asked her publisher to change the wording to say "settlers" instead of "people," as noted when she said, "You are perfectly right about the fault in Little House on the Prairie and have my permission to make the correction as you suggest. It was a stupid blunder of mine. Of course Indians are people and I did not intend to imply they were not."

Still, that's not good enough for The Association Of Library For Children.  Wilders', a product of a different time, was expunged from history despite the significant impact she had on children reading.  It makes me wonder what other literary giants are next on the erasure list.  Mark Twain appears to be the most obvious given the noted challenges in Huckleberry Finn.  Ernest Hemingway wrote some stuff that many consider to be misogynistic and homophobic.  Even William Shakespeare wrote stuff, such as in The Merchant Of Venice, that can be considered antisemitic stereotypes.

How much history do we want to erase, and what does that say about our own legacies?  Two hundred years from now, what might succeeding generations think about our work?  Will our portrayal of stuff be considered wrongspeak?  Will we be similarly expunged from the record?  We need to get a grip on our being offended, for it's denying some of the best work of history and the authors that provided that literature.  I would hope we are all sufficiently self-aware to know how to separate great literature from some of the attitudes of previous eras.  If we're not, what are we doing reading in the first place?