God, the tv show made a mockery of these books

I appreciate that Charles Ingalls was apparently not as bigoted as the other white folk settling in Indian Territory--including his wife. And I understand that all of these events took place a hundred and fifty-ish years ago, and I love tiny Laura for being curious about the Indians, rather than hating and fearing them like her mother and her older sister, but re-reading Little House on the Prairie made me kinda itchy. One of the things I hate most about this country's history is what we did to the people who'd been living here for probably thousands of years--just because their skin was darker than ours. A lot of times throughout the book, Laura hears, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian," but her father doesn't believe it, so she doesn't either. I don't think she sees the Indians as people, just like her, but she's, like, six. So I'll let it go. Still. It makes me uncomfortable, reading about the way these white people just decided that they should have the land because they wanted to settle it and farm it and "civilize" it (whatever that means). This is good children's literature, the kind that makes me antsy, because it deals with things. One of the greatest things is that grown-up Laura does not impose any of her own views--she tells the story almost entirely through tiny Laura's knowledge of the world. The only time she interjects--that I recall--is when she explains about malaria and how people didn't know back then that you could catch it from mosquitoes. So she doesn't preach about how to treat Indians (and what she even believed, when she grew up, about her time in Indian Territory, I have no idea), she just tells us how she experienced it as a small child who couldn't comprehend the entirety of this pioneering situation. I like that. A lot.

Did anyone else totally hate Mary Ingalls? Until she went blind, and then you kind of felt bad for her? I have totally and utterly identified with Laura since I was six years old. She's one of my literary heroes, and I didn't even realize it until I started reading the books again.