re: #232 A hollow voice says, Covfefe.

I don’t agree. You’re throwing out too important a baby with the bath water (like banning the entire corpus of Mary Poppins because of one (horribly stereotyped) chapter.

Also, I read those books at about that age, and wasn’t moved to think the Indians in the book had anything to do with anyone living. I was more impressed by the black doctor — at about eight years old (and in my surroundings), I had never seen one, nor realized that there was anything more than whites and Indians in the history of the western frontier.

Good teachers can use uncomplimentary portrayals of characters in stories as teaching moments. Huckleberry Finn still catches flak for the Jim character, though Twain in fact was trying to show how two people of different races could still become friends. And the n* word was part of the language back then.

OTOH using the Ingalls books in a classroom in which there were Native American or First Nation students could be problematic.