Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder traces the Little House books’ role in American culture wars. Wilder’s memory books were taken up by libertarians early on, thanks to her daughter and collaborator, Rose Wilder Lane—a successful journalist made paranoid by the New Deal. American rightists still talk up Wilder’s pioneers. As Fraser wrote in the L.A. Times a few years back, responding to bootstrap crap titled “Lessons in Liberty from Laura Ingalls Wilder” in the conservative journal National Affairs, “Wilder’s life and work have long been appropriated by the improving and pious, eager to seize on her faith or patriotism to promote their own agendas.”[1]
While Ms. Fraser has pushed back there, there are writers on the left who are ready to let the right claim the Little House books. Take Eula Biss’s disposition in a 2015 Times essay, “White Debt.” Ms. Biss’s essay has virtues. Her post-Coates clarity about what white Americans owe black Americans is bracing, especially since she’s more self-aware than some newly woke critics of white privilege. I like how she distances herself from silly p.c. policing of faux-pas and dig her humorous nod to Indian writer Sherman Alexie who once warned her against making too much of white “collusion”: “White people do crazy shit when they feel guilty.” (A line that kicks harder after Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign against “deplorables.”) But I doubt I’m mad to resist when Ms. Biss commends her son’s blunted response to a Little House book. She recalls reading the story with pleasure but signs off on his choice to call it quits—“I wish I was French.” I read that book to my son too and young Biss’s superior shame was foreign to moi and mine. Maybe that’s on us—a sign of our complacency about crimes against Native Americans. But consider the scene where Little House’s heroine Laura watches an Osage tribe head out after an “Indian Jamboree”—a scene that proved to be the Biss Family breaking point. Laura cops then to a desire that’s seems more homey—and less affected?—than young Biss’s Francophilia. In an All-American confession, she admits “a naughty wish to be a little Indian girl.”
That wish puts her at odds with her racist Mom. Her “perfectly friendly” dad, though, is another story.[2] (More on “Pa” anon.) Laura’s desire gets stronger as she “looked and looked at the Indians and they looked back at her” until an Indian mother rides past her “with a basket on each side of her pony…”
Laura looked straight into the bright eyes of the little baby nearer her. Only its small head showed above the basket’s rim. Its hair was as black as a crow and its eyes were black as a night when no stars shine.
Those black eyes looked deep into Laura’s eyes and she looked deep down into the blackness of that little baby’s eyes, and she wanted that one little baby.
“Pa” she said, “get me that little Indian baby!”
“Hush Laura!” Pa told her sternly…
“Oh Pa!” Laura pleaded, and then she began to cry. It was shameful to cry, but she couldn’t help it. The little Indian baby was gone. She knew she would never see it any more.
Ma said she had never heard of such a thing.
“For shame, Laura,” she said, but Laura could not stop crying. “Why on earth do you want an lndian baby, of all things!” Ma asked her.
“Its eyes are so black,” Laura sobbed. She could not say what she meant.
She can’t say, but there’s a human stain in American history that shows what she meant (again and again). Ideologues from El Norte, though, tend to pass on the, ah, jouissance of America’s crossover flows and end up missing what’s most fun about the house they live in,[3]
One of young Biss’s expressions of white guilt—“I don’t want to be on this team.”—sends me to a supremely playful moment in On the Rez (2000), Ian Frazier’s account of modern Indian life. The author tells how a young Oglala Sioux athlete, SuAnne Marie Big Crow, made a girls’ basketball game the occasion for a revel that was both an affirmation of Indian identity and a bet on America. SuAnne became a legend in her time among Oglala Sioux and not a few other South Dakotans when she silenced a crowd that had a history of shouting racist jibes at Indian teams during pre-game warm-ups–“’Squaw!’ or ‘Where’s the cheese?’ (the joke being that if Indians were lining up it must to get the commodity cheese).” SuAnne went to center court, took off her warm-up jacket and used it to do her tribe’s shawl dance (per Frazier):
[T[he dance she chose was a young woman’s dance, graceful and modest and show-offy all at the same time. “I couldn’ believe it—she was powwowin’, like ‘get down!’ [an older teammate] recalled. “And then she started to sing.” SuAnne began to sing in Lakota, swaying back and forth in the jump-ball circle…The crowd went completely silent. “All that stuff Lead fans were yelling—it was like she reversed it somehow”…In the sudden quiet all you could hear was her Lakota song. SuAnne stood up, dropped her jacket, took the ball…ran a lap around the court dribbling expertly and fast. The fans began to cheer and applaud. She sprinted to the basket, went up in the air and laid the ball through the hoop, with the fans cheering loudly now. Of course [her team] went on to the win the game.
This all took place in the late 80s in a mining town, Lead (as in vein of rock), that had been the epicenter of the massive land grab from the Sioux that went down after gold was found in the Black Hills in the 1870s. Frazier deepens the drama by placing SuAnne’s dance in the context of a century of crimes against Indians. He compares her deed to “counting coup,” an intimate gesture of almost “abstract courage” that was the highest act of heroism for Sioux warriors: “to count coup meant to touch an armed enemy in full possession of his powers with a special stick called a coup stick, or with the hand.” That touch wasn’t a blow. It was almost playful—a sign of how close you’d come to the enemy. Frazier avers SuAnne was counting coup when she did her dance. He notes, though, it was an act of peace, not of war. It came, after all, before a game…
There will always be mega-MAGA types who don’t want to play with people of some other color, but Frazier notes Lead’s acceptance of SuAnne’s invitation to dig her culture turned out to be more than a one-off. After her dance, girls from the Rez and girls from Lead began to hang out following games. One of SuAnne’s teammates recalls how Indian girls even got to know some of their new friends’ parents: “We found out there are some really good people in Lead.”
SuAnne might have had a clue all along there because she read Little House books when she was growing up. Figures in those books may have helped bolster her faith she could touch white Americans. And it’s not just Laura; “Pa” is a damn paragon.
It occurs to me a sketch of him hunting at the end of one Little House book may have uses for participants in the current Children’s Crusade for gun control. In this set-piece, Pa heads out in the evening to kill a deer so his family will have meat after months without. But they’re fated to stay hungry and we learn why when Pa explains what happened in the woods. He’d faded out in his hiding place in the trees above a dear-lick but woke up in time:
The big round moon was just rising. I could see it between the bare branches of the trees, low in the sky. And right against it I saw a deer standing. His head was up and he was listening. His great branching horns stood out above his head. He was dark against the moon.
It was a perfect shot. But he was so beautiful. He looked so strong and free and wild, that I couldn’t kill him. I sat there and looked at him until he bounded away into the dark woods.
Pa’s family may be waiting on good fresh game, but he ends up passing on chances to shoot a bear and then a doe with a yearling. As the night goes on, he becomes an undeniable No-in-wonder to D.H. Lawrence’s notorious riff on “The essential American soul”: “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” That’s why there might be a lesson here for those kids who are taking the lead in the fight against Second Amendment absolutism. They must not assume everyone who can handle a rifle conforms to Lawrentian axioms on American hard-men. Today’s child-advocates need to ante up like SuAnne Big Crow and act like there are plenty of good people in places like Lead.
Notes
1 Claire Messud invokes Fraser’s L.A. Times piece in Messud’s review of Prairie Fires in the current issue of New York Review of Books.
2 To borrow his characterization of an Osage warrior.
3 Been blind/deaf myself on this front sometimes. My own lil’ history of blankness about America’s mutty culture was in my ear recently when I heard Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie.” Back in 69, I thought the song was kitsch. Turns out White just sounded too down home for my New England brain. I don’t guess “Polk Salad Annie” would keep Ms Biss’s wannabe Frenchie away from Paree, but – what the hey – any country that can make a white man with as much soul as Tony Joe ain’t all bad. (As the French intuited; “Polk Salad Annie” broke in Europe before it became a hit in America.)