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[quote=Anonymous]My memory is that the really racist stuff is mostly said by her mother.  Reading the books, it's pretty clear that Laura is not really on the same page as her mother on most things, and that her mother is definitely the conservative element in the family.  Her views are probably indicative of the views of most white pioneers at the time and I think it would be white-washing to omit that racist attitude from any book about the time period.

The father has a different attitude about Native populations -- he generally admires their skills set and fortitude and thinks they've been ill-treated by the white man.  The narrator (Laura) tends to be much more admiring of her father, so I read the books as implicitly accept this view.
That said, even the father is accepting of the dominant white view of the 18th, 19th and early 20th century -- that one could only really "own" land if you made use of it in an economic sense.  There's a line where the father says something like that its okay for the white man to take the Indians' land because they will farm it, and the Indians were wasting good fertile farming land.  That was definitely the predominant attitude that justified taking land from Native populations across the Americas (and, I'd guess, was probably also in play in parts of Europe in earlier centuries).  It's not how we currently think of land and the rights of individuals or communities, but it's an incredibly important part of the pioneer experience.

I know this is adult analysis of the books, but looking back, I'm pretty sure that as a child, I read the mother as being, at a minimum, kind of a PITA and thought her views on Indians (as well as her views on how girls "should" behave) were dumb.  The TV show was different than the books in how the mom was depicted, definitely.

I'm not sure how I feel about renaming the award itself.  I guess I feel like naming things after people is inherently problematic because people are so flawed, and because social norms change so much from century to century that what was acceptable in one generation (like JFK's philandering and likely sexual harassment of women that worked with him) is really distasteful in another.  [/quote]

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