Little House on Stolen Lands
While you were busy posting about The Odyssey, Netflix was busy woke-washing America's most beloved children's series.
“A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. They drove away and left it lonely and empty in the clearing among the big trees, and they never saw that little house again. They were going to the Indian country.”
And so opens the most beloved children’s novel ever written.
You’ve read the books. If you’re my age, you watched the old television series, too.
And now Netflix has produced a “fresh adaptation” of the series.
You know what that means! Time to give the entire Ingalls family the switch for using racist language like “Indian country.”
The racist Ingalls family and the patriarchal Pa are about to learn a thing or two from the feminist Hollywood HR team.
When I first heard that Netflix was making a new Little House on the Prairie television series, I immediately assumed it would be unwatchable tripe, like nearly every other “remake” and “reboot” Hollywood attempts.
They keep exhuming the corpses of our beloved childhood stories in a desperate attempt to monetize familiar IP with built-in audiences—but instead of giving these characters the respect they’ve earned, they dip them in Current Thing sauce and hope you’ll choke it down without complaining.
It is hard to overstate how protective Little House readers are of the books and the author. I spent many happy hours on the prairie and on the banks of Plum Creek with the Ingalls family. Few things in life are perfect; these books are.
And the idea that the stories were real, that there was a real-life actual girl named Laura who really did all those things—that was mind-blowing to think about.
The new nation Laura described was itself a major character in the books—the meta plot of the whole series is that this little family is a front-row witness to the taming of the harsh wilderness into the future behemoth of a nation. There was purpose and meaning behind Pa’s wildest dreams, and it all went back to the dream and promise of America.
The original television series, which ran from 1974 to 1983 and lives on still in reruns, was a beloved staple in every kid’s life. It was not at all faithful to the books, featured made-up characters and situations and turned the stories into pat, sitcom-tier dramedies. Laura’s nemesis Nellie Olesen was hardly the villain in real life she was on the show, for example.
But the old show did one crucial thing: it captured the pro-American, pro-pioneer spirit. It maintained the sterling reputation of the Ingalls family as goodhearted Americans who made the best of often trying times, and never stopped being grateful for what they had. The show was infused with Christian morals, old-fashioned patriotism, and an almost saint-like patriarch in the figure of Michael Landon, who played Pa. He was America’s Dream Dad on the prairie. The relationship between father and daughter was the heart of the show, and that was okay.
And crucially, historical realities were not rewritten to make 2026 woke feminist showrunners feel better about white pioneer life.
The showrunner of the newly re-imagined Little House series is a screenwriter named Rebecca Sonnenshine. She’s riding high after adapting the novel The Housemaid into a smash hit movie starring Sidney Sweeney.
Now she’s done to Little House exactly what you’d expect: corrected all of its glaring errors, latent racism, and lack of diversity.
Don’t believe me? Check out the interview Sonnenshine did with a screenwriting magazine (see below).
The interview makes it clear that Sonnenshine and Netflix have done exactly what you’d expect: taken it upon themselves to deliver reparations for the innate racism and prejudices of the backwards and ignorant American pioneers.
Behold:
