Think of the Little House on the Prairie books and those of a certain vintage will instantly conjure mental images of young sisters in their bonnets and gingham dresses forever playing and tumbling in the tall grasses of Kansas. This was westward expansion – both in the novels from the 1930s and the 1970s TV series that followed – as an inspiring tale of pioneers and possibility.
But the semi-autobiographical stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder have faced a more complicated legacy in recent years. As the notion of manifest destiny has become decidedly more problematic, so too have Wilder’s words, even prompting the US Association for Library Service to Children to remove her name from one of its awards in 2018.
The decision stemmed from Wilder’s "anti-Native and anti-Black sentiment in her work", with Native characters often reduced to background figures in a narrative centred on the settler experience or becoming the targets of overt prejudice – "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" being among the most infamous lines.
It’s a judgement that was no doubt in the minds of those adapting the stories for this eight-part reimagining from Netflix, a second season of which has already been commissioned.
View Green Video on the source websitePromotional images capture patriarch Charles (Luke Bracey), wife Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald) and daughters Laura (Alice Halsey) and Mary (Skywalker Hughes) looking serene in a verdant field beneath a vast sky. Clearly, it has been decided that to flat-out remove the earnest frontier idealism would be akin to replacing Pa’s wagon with a motorhome.
But the episodes prove more nuanced than the promotional art would suggest, with those who previously remained out of shot now allowed to step fully into frame. So, while the plot follows the familiar route of the Ingalls family leaving the woods of Wisconsin for a new life on the open prairie, attention is also paid to those whose land is being settled, specifically the Osage people forced to surrender what was once theirs.
Rather than being fully aware that he is moving to what he refers to in the original stories as "Indian territory", Charles is presented as someone tricked by opportunistic officials into believing that the Kansas land is legally open for settlement. Once he learns the truth, Charles is left morally conflicted by a mindset that treats westward movement as inevitable.
Laura, too, is given fresh food for thought when she meets a girl named Good Eagle (Wren Zhawenim Gotts), whose Osage family are neighbours of the Ingalls'. Given that Good Eagle is an entirely new creation, there’s no way of knowing whether Laura would have forged a friendship quite like the one depicted here, and some viewers could accuse Netflix of applying a distinctly 21st-century filter to frontier life. Others, however, may see it more as a justified widening of the perspective.
That approach is most evident in the penultimate episode, scripted by Native American writer Tom Hanada, which sees the Osage left with little choice but to sign away their land amid fears that the army will intervene and break a negotiating deadlock. As it becomes clear that treaty after treaty has steadily shrunk both Native territory and populations, leaving communities with precious little beyond their dignity, Charles is shown grappling with the role he has played in that loss.
Amid the soul-searching, there’s also wisdom of the more homespun variety threaded throughout the series, with Caroline gaining the upper hand over the community’s resident snob, Mary navigating first love and Laura learning how to handle disappointment, alongside a Christmas-themed hour boasting almost Hallmark levels of wholesomeness. And really, it wouldn’t be Little House without at least a little sentimental syrup drizzled over proceedings.
The result is an undeniably heartfelt family drama that, for all its coming-of-age anxieties and sweeping vistas, also dares to ask some difficult questions about the true price of progress.
Little House on the Prairie will be released in full on 9 July on Netflix.
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