Little House

Growing up, ‘Little House on the Prairie’ was the closest thing my family had to religion.

We had the whole cloth-bond illustrated series on our bookshelves. My mother read them to me, and I read them to my little sisters. Michael Landon’s Little House series was one of the only tv shows we were allowed to watch.  Our mother sewed us prairie girl costumes for Halloween, but we wore them year-round to play pioneer in the basement. The highlight of Junior High were the ‘Pioneer Days’ held each Spring, when the whole school dressed up in period clothing, each grade was divided into ‘wagon groups,’ and we turned the front lawn into ‘homestead’ plots which our social studies teachers judged for ingenuity and authenticity. (My peers and I were all in because we were allowed to make campfires.) In my childhood there was nothing that more closely identified with morality, wholesomeness, ingenuity and patriotism than the Ingalls family. I was taught that pilgrims and pioneers were what made America Great.

But when I picked up the books again as an adult to read them to my own daughters, I was shocked. It was the height of the 2016 Presidential campaign and then candidate Trump’s promise to build a wall and deport ‘illegals’ was one of the most popular elements of his campaign. Over and over, the country was reassured that this rhetoric wasn’t ‘anti-immigrant.’ Trump and his allies just wanted people to come ‘the right way.’ 

But what I never noticed when I read the books as a child was that the Ingalls family had no legal documents granting them permission to be pioneers. In the first chapter of the book, Pa explains that he’s moving the family from Wisconsin because there were ‘too many people in the Big Woods now,’ and he ‘liked a place where the wild animals lived unafraid.’ The book’s narrator explains that ‘In the Western land…there were no people. Only Indians.’ Pa tries to get middle daughter Laura excited about the move, promising her that when they get to Indian Country she’ll see a ‘real Indian baby in a papoose.’ At one point, Pa reassures the family that the territory will be opened to settlers someday, but there is no way to know if or when that will happen because ‘Washington is so far away.’The Ingalls family is aware they have no legal right to settle in what they repeatedly acknowledge is ‘Indian Country,’  but they go anyway because…they wanted to. As a child, I was taught to celebrate the pioneers like the Ingalls family because they worked hard and risked everything to build a better life for their children. 

But now, we don’t call those who work hard and risk everything to build a better life for their children pioneers. Now we are told to call them illegal aliens and violent criminals. According to contemporary political rhetoric, Ma and Pa Ingalls were national security threats and should have been separated from their children, thrown in prison and deported. Can you imagine ICE agents rounding up the men of Walnut Grove as they plowed the fields and disappearing them? Would you be proud if masked federal agents ziptied Laura’s wrists behind her back? Pa and Ma never got summoned to immigration courts, but if they had, would it seem right to you that the government used the court proceedings in order to make quotas by arresting the very people respecting the rule of law?

I wish that the history of our country didn’t include broken treaties, land theft and the genocide of native peoples. But that is our history. And it is the height of hypocrisy to scapegoat and demonize contemporary families for making the very same choices we celebrate earlier Americans for making. As you watch ICE agents rounding up people at their workplaces, at the immigration court house and on their way to pick up their kids at the church preschool, ask yourself why these actions are marketed as making America great again? Ask yourself why we mythologize the Ingalls family and criminalize the Iglesias family when they make the same choices? It’s tempting to call it hypocrisy, but it’s more accurate to call it white supremacy.