The Little House series reflects a fictionalized version of the Ingalls family’s lived experiences during the mid-1800s, meaning that its structure is dependent upon the dominant political beliefs and movements of white Christian people in the United States at the time, one of the foremost among them being the concept of “manifest destiny.” Coined by journalist John O’Sullivan in 1845, manifest destiny denoted the idea that Americans (particularly white Americans) and their “institutions are morally superior and therefore Americans are morally obligated to spread those institutions in order to […] uplift ‘less civilized’ societies”—such as the many Indigenous groups that already inhabited the lands that white settlers sought to seize for their own use (“Westward Expansion.” Historynet). Notably, Laura’s father, Charles Ingalls, was one of an array of white settlers who actively sought to take premature advantage of the US government’s rumored intentions to open up the lands of Kansas to white settlement. Not deigning to wait for official permission, he uprooted his family and struck out west, intending to beat the rush to the Osage Diminished Reserve’s prime farmland. Thus, the homestead depicted in The Little House on the Prairie was founded under illegal circumstances, a fact that remains largely unexamined by Wilder’s heavily edited account.

Scholars have since noted many discrepancies between key historical realities and Wilder’s depictions of her family’s travels. For example, while she consistently portrays the Ingalls family pushing westward, intentionally idealizing frontier life, the family was actually forced to abandon several failed homesteads and retrace their steps to previous locations. Additionally, Wilder’s portrayals of the Indigenous, Black, and Latino people also reflect her own racism, a trait shared by many white settlers of the time period. Even the novel’s casual descriptions of the landscape betray this bias, and in subsequent years, the narrative has come under heavy critique. For example, in the original version of the novel, Wilder describes “the family […] traveling to a country where ‘there were no people; only Indians lived there,’” and “this erasure of Indigenous humanity stood for nearly two decades until 1953, when an insightful reader urged the publisher to correct the line” by replacing the word “people” with “settlers” (Studarus, Laura. “How Much of ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Really Happened?” History.com. 8 July 2026). 

Incidences of Wilder’s racist attitudes toward Indigenous people reappear throughout the narrative, and these depictions are rendered even more harmful by the fact that the story is told from a child’s perspective. This faux-innocent framing creates a broadly uncritical narrative that prevents its young target readers from realizing the racist errors in perception that often drive the novel’s conflicts. For example, the white adults in the novel frequently speak derisively of Indigenous people amongst themselves, declaring outright that “[t]he only good Indian was a dead Indian” and even going so far as to falsely claim that the prairie fire in Chapter 22 is caused by Indigenous people who have malicious intent toward white settlers (211). While Pa and Laura both hold more complimentary views, even they do not see the Indigenous people as fully human. At one notable point in the novel, Laura assumes that she has the right to “keep” an Indigenous baby, almost as though she views the child as an exotic pet.

While Wilder’s work has remained a centerpiece of classic American literature for many years, dominant sentiments have gradually shifted, with the most notable change occurring as late as 2018, when the US Association for Library Service to Children made the decision to rename its long-standing “Laura Ingalls Wilder Award” to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. Some modern readers have argued in favor of removing racist language and references from reprints of the Little House books, while others contend that the series is fundamentally a literary artifact that should be preserved as it was written so that its ingrained racism and biased portrayals can be candidly studied. As biographer Pamela Smith Hill notes of the author’s racism, “It’s very disturbing, but it is part of our history, and if we don’t talk about these issues honestly with our children we are jeopardizing their future and the future of our country” (Fields, Liz. “What Should Be Done about Racist Depictions in the ‘Little House” Books?” Laura Ingalls Wilder: Prairie to Page. Season 34, Episode 7. PBS. 11 January 2021).