Op-Ed: Fan Reckons With Frontier Myths of Little House

Laura Ingalls Wilder's frontier isn't looking quite the same to Glynnis MacNicol these days. In a New York Times opinion piece, MacNicol revisits the Little House books that enchanted her as a child and finds a much darker story beneath the cozy cabins and Pa's fiddle, including grinding poverty and the idea of a father who seems to be forever "dragging his family from place to place." And then there's the jarringly racist portrayal of Native Americans that now feels uncomfortably current to MacNicol.

Her piece uses Netflix's new Little House reboot as a lens on how the story—and American history—is being retold. Where Wilder's books often cast Native people as frightening or peripheral, the series centers Osage characters, gives a Black doctor and Black settlers bigger roles, and makes clear how government and railroad interests used white homesteaders to dispossess Native nations. MacNicol argues the adaptation doesn't betray the text so much as pull out threads that were always there.

• "In rebooting Little House, a text that, for better and worse, has come to dominate our understanding of the era of Western expansion in American history, the show once again holds up a mirror to the nation. We might use it to honestly ask ourselves how we got here, and who we have become in the process." Read the full essay.