A division of the American Library Association has voted to remove the name of Laura Ingalls Wilder from a major children’s book award, over concerns about how the author portrayed African Americans and Native Americans. The board of the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) made the unanimous decision to change the name on Saturday, at a meeting in New Orleans. The name of the prize was changed from the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. The association said Wilder “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values”. The first award was given to Wilder in 1954. The ALSC said Wilder’s work continued to be published and read but her “legacy is complex” and “not universally embraced”. Wilder was born in 1867 and died in 1957. She is best known for her eight Little House on the Prairie novels, about pioneer life in the American west, which were published between 1932 and 1943. In 2010, the British broadcaster Samira Ahmed wrote for the Guardian: “Wilder has a special status in American culture despite posthumous allegations of racism. The Osage nation, according to biographer Pamela Smith Hill, still condemns her work, which was based on their eviction. “The novels are full of phrases that are unacceptable today. Even in her own lifetime Wilder apologised for her thoughtlessness and amended a line in Little House on the Prairie that said Kansas had ‘no people, only Indians’. It now reads, ‘no settlers, only Indians’.”<doc-sep>The Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, a significant achievement award in children’s literature presented by a division of the American Library Assn., will be renamed because of the author’s “stereotypical attitudes” toward Native Americans and African Americans. The Assn. for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Assn., voted Saturday that the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, named for the author of “Little House on the Prairie,” will now be known as the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. The group explained the decision in a statement on its website: “This decision was made in consideration of the fact that Wilder’s legacy, as represented by her body of work, includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness.” The newly renamed Children’s Literature Legacy Award was first awarded in 1954 to Wilder. Past winners have included E.B. White, Beverly Cleary, Maurice Sendak and, most recently, Jacqueline Woodson. Advertisement Criticism of Wilder’s attitudes toward people of color has spanned decades. The Washington Post reports that in 1952, a reader of “Little House on the Prairie” noted that the book describes the American West as a place where “there were no people. Only Indians lived there.” Despite that, Wilder’s “Little House” books have remained cultural mainstays ever since their original publication in the 1930s and 1940s. The series inspired a long-running television show starring Michael Landon and Melissa Gilbert, which has long been run in syndication. In a May report by an association task force, the organization acknowledged that Wilder’s books “hold a significant place in the history of children’s literature and continue to be read today” and “are a product of her life, experience and perspective as an individual White woman of her era.” However, the group noted, “changing the name of the award, or ending the award and establishing a new award, does not prohibit access to Wilder’s works or suppress discussion about them. Neither option asks or demands that anyone stop reading Wilder’s books, talking about them, or making them available to children.” Wilder was the subject of a 2017 biography, “Prairie Fires,” by Caroline Fraser. The book was published to positive reviews, and won both the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. In an opinion piece for the Washington Post, written in March, shortly after the organization announced it was considering renaming the award, Fraser argued that Wilder’s “work and its reception are more complicated than we may once have believed, shedding light on the myths that white Americans have woven about the past.” “There’s nothing wrong with changing the name of an award,” Fraser wrote. “Chagrin, however, can be short-lived, and gatekeepers like the ALA should encourage children to read all our provocative classics —critically. I’d like to think that what would matter to Wilder in this debate would be not the institutionalized glory of an award bearing her name but the needs of children.”<doc-sep>The American Library Association (ALA) has stressed that its decision to drop Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from its children’s literature award due to racist sentiments in her books is not “an attempt to censor, limit, or deter access” to the Little House on the Prairie author’s books. The organisation announced on Sunday that the board of the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) had voted 12 to zero in favour of changing the name of the Laura Ingalls Wilder award to the Children’s literature legacy award. The prize was first awarded in 1954 to Wilder herself, and has been won by some of America’s best-loved children’s authors, from EB White to Beverly Cleary. The ALA first proposed a possible name change in 2017, feeling that its values of diversity and inclusion were not consistent with the “complex legacy” of Wilder, “as her books reflect racist and anti-Native sentiments and are not universally embraced”. Wilder’s legacy has long been controversial due to the attitudes in her autobiographical novels. The phrase “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”, is repeated three times in Little House on the Prairie, while in On the Banks of Plum Creek, Mary tells Laura: “You’ll be brown as an Indian, and what will the town girls think of us?” In Little Town on the Prairie, Laura’s father takes part in a minstrel show, while Laura’s mother’s dislike of Native Americans is made clear: “She looked as if she were smelling the smell of an Indian whenever she said the word. Ma despised Indians. She was afraid of them, too.” The ALA cited an article by the academic Frances Kaye in its decision where she wrote: “I honestly cannot read Little House on the Prairie as other than apology for the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Great Plains.” Another academic, Debbie Reese, whose focus is the representation of Native Americans in children’s books, responded to the ALA’s decision: “Wilder’s depictions of African Americans and Native people are flawed and racist. Some will argue that at the time she wrote the books, things like blackface and stereotyping weren’t seen as wrong. But, of course, African Americans and Native peoples knew them to be wrong.” In a survey of librarians, around 300 ALA members said the prize’s name should be changed, and around 150 said it should not. Those who supported the change cited racism and the negative impact of Wilder’s books on child readers amongst their reasons. Those against changing the name cited censorship, “bowing to PC pressure”, and not judging people from the past by today’s standards. In a joint statement by ALA president Jim Neal and ALSC president Nina Lindsay acknowledged that Wilder’s books were “deeply meaningful to many readers”, and that the series “holds a significant place in the history of children’s literature”. But they said the books are also “a product of [Wilder’s] life experiences and perspective as a settler in America’s 1800s”, and therefore “reflect dated cultural attitudes toward indigenous people and people of colour that contradict modern acceptance, celebration, and understanding of diverse communities”. Neal and Lindsay said changing the name of the award should not be viewed as an attempt to censor Wilder’s books, “but rather as an effort to align the award’s title with ALSC’s core values”, stressing that the change “should not be viewed as a call for readers to change their personal relationship with or feelings about Wilder’s books”. “We are not demanding that anyone stop reading Wilder’s books, talking about them, or making them available to children. We hope adults think critically about Wilder’s books and the discussions that can take place around them,” they said. The ALA is now looking to examine its other prizes, including the Geisel award, to see if further changes need to be made. Geisel, named for Theodore Geisel or The Cat in the Hat author Dr Seuss, has also come under recent scrutiny, with a US librarian arguing last year that his illustrations “are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes”. In 2015, HP Lovecraft was dropped as the image of the World Fantasy award after a campaign described the Cthulhu author as an “avowed racist” with “hideous opinions”.<doc-sep>
The board of the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association, made the unanimous decision to remove the name of author Laura Ingalls Wilder from a major children’s book award at a meeting in New Orleans on Saturday. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books. (Photo: Getty Images) The name of the prize has been changed from the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award, the Guardian reports. The association, which took the vote at its board meeting in New Orleans, said the vote “was greeted by a standing ovation by the audience in attendance,” Fox News reports. Wilder is best known for her beloved Little House on the Prairie novels, which the ALSC has stated “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values” based on Wilder’s portrayal of black people and Native Americans. The first award was given to Wilder in 1954. The ALSC, which is based in Chicago, says her work continues to be published and read but her “legacy is complex” and “not universally embraced.” In February, the ALA announced that it was reconsidering the name of the Wilder Award. At the time, the ALA declared that her legacy put the group in the position of serving children’s reading and education while being unable to model values of “inclusiveness, integrity and respect.” Wilder’s books, it stated, “reflect racist and anti-Native sentiments and are not universally embraced.” Wilder was born in 1867 and died in 1957. Her most famous novel, Little House on the Prairie (1935), has inspired almost as much disapproval as devotion. The novel has racist elements, and its portrayal of Native Americans has had consequences when read uncritically in schools. In the late 1990s, scholar Waziyatawin Angela Cavender Wilson approached the Yellow Medicine East School District after her daughter came home crying because of a line in the book, first attributed to Gen. Philip Sheridan but a common saying by that time: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Story continues However, in her own lifetime Wilder apologized for some of her thoughtlessness, and amended a line in Little House that read Kansas had “no people, only Indians.” It now reads, “no settlers, only Indians.” Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.