We now know that several of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books represent the land that her people live in as “uninhabited,” even though we now know this is not the case.
The portrayal of Native Americans and other underrepresented groups in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books does not hold up well in our post-colonial world. Context is everything. A young girl of eight years old, who had been reading Little House on the Prairie with her class in 1998, was left with a very unsettling reaction to the sentence “The only good native is a dead native.”
Although a supporting character in the book made this statement, neither Laura Ingalls Wilder nor the person she portrayed believed it to be accurate. A line such as that is probably not acceptable for a classroom in an elementary school today—at least, not without an experienced instructor offering a complete explanation of the context in which the line is being used.