While Wilder often emphasized and exaggerated the family’s isolation, in the Netflix show, the Ingallses are far from alone. In one episode, Laura gives a speech on the meaning of Independence, the town and the idea, that focuses on the need for community and support. The Native Americans depicted are no longer presented as thieves, but as individuals taking back what they believe is rightfully theirs from invasive settlers claiming and plundering the land. Dr. George Tann (Dr. Tan in the books), the real-life Black doctor who in 1870 delivered Laura’s sister Carrie and saved the family from malaria, occupies a starring role. The shopkeeper is a Black woman who moved from Nicodemus, Kan., an all-Black settlement founded by formerly enslaved people at the close of Reconstruction. Pa’s brother George, who fought in the Civil War, is clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The railroad barons — the tech oligarchs of those days — are cast as the bad guys, working in nefarious concert with the government that has lured white settlers with promises of free land in the hopes of using them to more quickly eradicate Native Americans.
None of this is laid out plainly in the books. But a closer read alludes to much of it.
For instance, in the book “By the Shores of Silver Lake,” which follows the Ingalls family into the Dakota Territory when Pa takes a job at the railroad, Laura “saw strange large depressions, straight-sided and flat-bottomed, that had been buffalo wallows.” By the end of Laura’s childhood, the buffalo population had been decimated at the behest of the U.S. Army, in an effort to eradicate Native Americans’ main food source and open land to white settlement.
In reframing the narrative, the show has simply taken these smaller observations and elevated them to the main story line.
So here we are again at another moment of immense political and social precarity, welcoming in yet another take on the story. The new adaptation incorporates some of the best parts of what Laura offered — courage, wonder, resilience — while widening the aperture of her lens. It insists on recognizing the humanity of all the people who made up Laura’s world, not just those inside her log cabin.
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.
