I cannot review the Little House books without talking about this: these books are racist. I hope that teachers or parents who are introducing these books to children for the first time are having serious discussions with these kids about racism and colonialism, and how these attitudes influenced westward expansion. As I was rereading these books (which, by the way, I loved as a kid and reread many times), I couldn’t stop thinking about the word “pioneer,” which in this case is just a euphemism […]
The central truth of their lives was the past….
Empire of the Summer Moon is not for everyone. It’s an elegiac paean to frontier America and the doomed struggle of Comanche Indians to maintain their way of life in the face of an unrelenting onslaught of white encroachment. It broadly encompasses the rugged bravado of American pioneers trying to fulfill their Manifest Destiny and the individual horrors of trying to eek out a life in a hostile world. It walks the delicate line between explaining how these disparate and dichotomous worlds clashed and parsing […]