Samira Ahmed on Laura Ingalls Wilder
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 4 December 2018
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the summer of 2018, the name of Laura Ingalls Wilder was erased from a children's literary medal set up in her honour six decades ago.
Readers of the 'Little House on the Prairie' series of books were widely perplexed, but the original American pioneer girl now finds herself at the centre of the culture wars in the US.
Nominating Laura is broadcaster and super-fan Samira Ahmed, who has been to Rocky Ridge Farm, now an historic museum in Missouri and Laura Ingalls Wilder's home.
Joining Samira in studio is novelist Tracy Chevalier, president of the Laura Ingalls Wilder club at the age of eight.
At the centre of the controversy - the depiction in these books of native Americans. “Her works reflect dated cultural attitudes toward indigenous people and people of colour that contradict modern acceptance, celebration, and understanding of diverse communities,” was the judgment of the ALSC.
Also featuring Laura Ingalls Wilder's biographer, Pamela Hill; plus the Commanche writer Paul Chaat Smith in an extract from The Invention of the USA. "I feel worried," says Samira Ahmed, "that we've lost the ability to have nuance. I cannot read these books without feeling aspects of racism, but why shouldn't we be able to read them and still see the beauty in them."
Presented by Matthew Parris.
Producer: Miles Warde
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2018.
Transcript
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| 0:45.8 | and live our own lives in a way that it is not possible for those keeping up with the crowd. |
| 0:51.8 | The woman who wrote that was a farmer, a mother and a pioneer. You'll probably |
| 0:56.1 | know her best from a slightly saccharine TV series made from the 1970s and 80s, Little House on the Prairie. |
| 1:04.0 | But the life on which it was based was made of much sterner stuff. |
| 1:08.0 | Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in 1867 in the Big Woods region of Wisconsin. When she was two, her family moved |
| 1:17.3 | south to Missouri, then west to Kansas, onto what was almost certainly a Native American |
| 1:22.4 | reservation, back to Wisconsin, then Iowa, and South Dakota, |
| 1:26.8 | where the family endured one of the severest winters on record. |
| 1:30.7 | Later, Laura went on to become a journalist and an author, and a bestseller too. |
| 1:36.0 | Joining me to discuss her life, a Laura's nominator, the broadcaster, Samira Ahmed, |
| 1:42.0 | and also the novelist Tracy Chevalier, the American British |
| 1:46.0 | writer whose second novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, was perhaps what launched her into |
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