Little House on the Prairie

[DirectorDave]

Laura Ingalls Wilder name has been removed from a book award over her "racist views and language".

How will history judge us? hopefully not as harshly as we seem to be judging history with our values of the day.

This is progress apparently.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44604844

[Pcdunn]

The phrase "Going west, where there were no people. Only Indians lived there." -- was changed by the publisher in 1952 to "no settlers", but plenty of other passages remained that were offensive to Native Americans. One example was an eight-year-old Dakota girl running home in tears after her teacher read a passage from a Wilder book aloud that contained the phrase "The only good Indian is a dead one."

[DirectorDave]

One example was an eight-year-old Dakota girl running home in tears after her teacher read a passage from a Wilder book aloud that contained the phrase "The only good Indian is a dead one."

Yeah she has every right to be in tears...the palefaces oppressed her people terribly.

And now a novel that showed the bigotry of the time in all it's horror is used against the author who gave us this gift through time.

[c.d.]

And they publish versions of "Huckleberry Finn" without the "N" word. Sad. As though we can change our history by whitewashing it.

c.d.

[Sam Flynn]

As though we can change our history by whitewashing it.

... so to speak.

[Mayerling]

The phrase "Going west, where there were no people. Only Indians lived there." -- was changed by the publisher in 1952 to "no settlers", but plenty of other passages remained that were offensive to Native Americans. One example was an eight-year-old Dakota girl running home in tears after her teacher read a passage from a Wilder book aloud that contained the phrase "The only good Indian is a dead one."

While Ms Wilder may have held those sentiments or not, or the character in the novel did, she is quoting General Phil Sheridan, who either said "The only good Indian I ever saw was a dead Indian." or it's equivalent, "I only saw one good Indian in my life, and he was dead!" Sheridan (who was a patron of George Armstrong Custer) was to end up the General-in-Chief of the U.S. Army after William Tecumseh Sherman retired. He was one of the winning generals and Northern (Union) heroes of the American Civil War, even being honored on a postage stamp with Grant and Sherman in the 1930s-40s. Maybe we should recall them all and destroy them. Maybe we should nullify the results of that war as Sherman was not a fan of emancipation and did everything in his power to prevent fleeing slaves joining the Union troops marching first to Atlanta, then to Savannah and the Sea, and then into the Carolinas.

At the time that Sheridan made his comment we had a series of wars with the Plains Indians. the Modoc Indians in the wilds of California, the Comanches, and the Apaches (Geronimo was not caught until the 1880s). While one can certainly blame US military, business, and political greed or blundering for their share in these matters, the same does not make Native American saints. How can one say that and ignore massacres going back to Jamestown in 1622 to Fort Mims in 1813 to later ones, including that murderous one against Marcus and Narcissa Whitman in 1847? The hypocrisy that mingles with so-called good intentions here is immense.


The only thing to consider satisfactory is that the same jerks pushing this type of view today, if they were brought back somehow in two hundred years, would find their lives and statements ripped apart by self-promoted censors of the future.


Jeff

[Ginger]

This sort of thing is hardly unique, nor even especially belonging to the 21st century. Thomas Bowdler's expurgated editions of Shakespeare and Gibbon (among others) met with considerable popularity in the Regency era, for all that today we tend to think of it as a time of excess and social experimentation.

[Harry D]

Just more pathetic virtue-signalling from liberal intelligentsia.

[DirectorDave]

Just more pathetic virtue-signalling from liberal intelligentsia.

Whoever came up with this is not a Liberal.

[Ginger]

I've always wondered why the people who feel such limitless outrage over our having conquered the indians and taken their stuff don't return their own land and property to the indians? It's not a bit difficult to discover what tribe owned a given piece of land before we took it, and most of the tribes are still in existence as legal entities, and thus able to own land. It would seem to me to be an obvious action for those who feel that way, but you never see anyone do it.


Edit: Aaaand... I'm the last of my line, and my boyfriend is already gone. I'd been planning to leave my stuff to friends, but now I'm tempted to leave it to the Potawatomi, with the proviso that they have to run an advertising campaign asking why their outspoken "defenders" don't do the same. I would die with a smirk on my face, thinking of all the hilarity that was about to break loose.

[c.d.]

Just more pathetic virtue-signalling from liberal intelligentsia.

Hello Harry,

Judging from your many political posts, are we to assume that Conservatives are free from sin or even a few foibles of their own?

c.d.

[Magpie]

Whoever came up with this is not a Liberal.

Nor a member of the intelligentsia

[Harry D]

Hello Harry,

Judging from your many political posts, are we to assume that Conservatives are free from sin or even a few foibles of their own?

c.d.

No one's whiter than white, CD. More's the pity.