This month, a fresh adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved Little House on the Prairie arrives on Netflix.
The reboot’s timing is auspicious. 2026 saw the apex of the tradwife discourse. And if the Brooklyn streets are anything to go by, a certain prairiecore aesthetic refuses to go quietly.
Pioneer nostalgia has tended to spike when conservatives are in power, which is no coincidence. When the cities are called dangerous, the enterprising are still told to make their own way in the wide open spaces. To go west. But as Dr. Paula Read wondered in a recent op-ed for Teen Vogue, “Is there anything new to be said that hasn’t been covered in the original nine books or the first TV adaptation?”
In other words: why haven’t we hit the end of the west?
*
Loosely based on Wilder’s own upbringing, the original Prairie books hit stands in the 30s. The first, Little House in the Big Woods, arrived in the thick of the Dust Bowl, when—to quote a recent Glynnis MacNicol op-ed in the Times—the middle of the country was especially “hungry for stories of resilience and hope.”
The Prairie books were instant bestsellers, and have never been out of print. Marketed as family-friendly, the series offered a rosy picture of an adventurous childhood. One that embraced the family unit as the most powerful social structure.
This was all by design.
As Dr. Read cites and Anita Claire Fellman explores in her 2008 book, Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Impact on American Culture, both Wilder and her daughter Rose Lane (who co-wrote the first book) were New Deal skeptics and libertarians who remained in thrall to the frontier thesis all their lives.
The books, published just as a social state began to coalesce in America, depict the Ingalls as independent. The family thrives in isolation, against the elements, and often despite community. The girls receive this message, over and over. To make it in the wild, you pull yourself up.
The novels also elide critical history.
According to History, the fictional and real Ingalls family built their little house illegally, on the Osage Diminished Reserve. Throughout the books, the family parrots settler logic. Describing the land the family lands on, Ingalls wrote that “there were no people; only Indians lived there.”
Amendments were made to the text in the 50s to historicize this disturbing phrase and philosophy. (Recently, the culture’s done a mightier reckoning with Laura’s legacy—see MacNicol’s podcast.) But anti-Native racism has proved a hard thing to scrub from the ur-text.
The first Little House television series—which raised its head in likewise troubled times, in the aftermath of Vietnam—also tended to glance over the Native populations the Ingalls family lived on top of.
That is, when it wasn’t retreading harmful stereotypes in language adjusted for the changing times.
*
Now, I grew up in a Laura-loving house. Wilder’s books were among the first hardcovers I remember hoarding. I remember feeling proud of their heft, in thrall to the cover illustrations. More than any real plot, I can still call up the routines of frontier life that Ingalls made so vivid. Like the way the girls made candy from tapping molasses trees, and letting syrup freeze on ice.
I fell for their scrappiness. The way they made and invented things. And I didn’t question the absence of neighbors, or neighborly feeling; at six, seven, and eight, I was too seduced by the possibilities of making my own world. Who needs helpers?
The fairy tale Laura fundamentally offers is just that: the one where a harsh new world bends to one’s will.
Rebecca Sonnenshine’s new adaptation aims to correct standing impressions from the series and the show, while troubling some of Wilder’s arguments. (Haters have decried its “woke-ification.”) This time around, it’s clear the family arrives to colonize Osage land. And a new cast of Osage and Black supporting characters have come to wobble the thrive-in-isolation narrative. In 2026, the prairie is a communal space.
Which is all well and good! Expanding the history of the West is in fact godly work at a moment when Black and Native studies are being threatened, in both elementary schools and the highest halls of higher ed.
But ought this be the avenue for that context, in the first place?
As MacNicol notes in her op-ed, “for better and worse, [Little House] has come to dominate [italics mine] our understanding of the era of Western expansion in American history.” That verb feels apt.
“The show once again holds up a mirror to the nation,” MacNicol writes, with couched praise. The mirror may be shinier now, but it’s still only got one thing to show us.
(And the world isn’t new. That’s the problem.)
