This past Wednesday was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 157th birthday.
If you’ve listened to WILDER, the podcast I did with Jo Piazza and Emily Marinoff, about the very complicated, sometimes shocking, life and times of little half-pint, you know that I have a lifelong fascination with her.
The fact I write memoirs is a direct result of this obsession. As is my love of road trips and of just generally being on the move.
I’m still amazed we got to do this podcast. It was exponentially more work than I anticipated. I wrote ENJOY while I was doing WIDLER, which resulted in my exiting 2023 feeling like I’d written approximately five books in one year. There are countless cringe-inducing errors in the galley copies of ENJOY because my brain didn’t clear enough to see them until we got to first pass pages (this is publishing process lingo I won’t bore you with until some later ‘how the sausage got made’ date). It was a lot. But I’m so proud of it.
Now that I’ve had time away from the creative process of both, I sort of marvel at what we were able to accomplish. Narrative podcasts are expensive and because of this fewer places are making them. Thanks to iHeart investing in us, we were able to drive around the country for three weeks. I think we covered nearly 2500 miles. We got to see for ourselves everything we were reading and talking about.
The podcast itself went to some unexpected places. I love the entire thing, but arguably my two favorite episodes, or the ones that have stuck with me the most, actually have very little to do with Laura directly.
In Episode 6. Outside the Little Houses, we talked to an environmental historian who told us so much of the flora and fauna (and wolves!) Laura was describing are now extinct. It was a devastating conversation, but also clarified for me why Laura’s descriptions are so gripping: she’s documenting a lost world.
Part of that world was lost before she got there. The American government used starvation as a way to exterminate the Native American population and make the land available for white settlement — a form of government social service for settlers (financing the railroads was another). In the late 1860s the government called for huntsmen to slaughter as many buffalo as they could. To give you a sense of what the meant, between 1840 and 1890 the population of buffalo in the U.S., the main food source for Native Americans, went from 35 million to 541.
Another historian talked about how there is blank space in American history books between 1860 and 1865 because all the history of that period gets sucked into the Civil War, and actually other things were happening.
In the final episode we got to talk with Ranger Tanya Gardner, a member of the Crow tribe from Lodge Grass, MT. Emily and I met Ranger Tanya when we drove up to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana at the tail end of our reporting trip. Ranger Tanya was giving the hourly talk to all the (mostly white) tourists in camper vans who’d come to the site formerly known as Custer’s Last Stand. We nearly missed it because up until she appeared we’d only seen older white men in the ranger uniform and, I won’t lie, wanted to get back to Sheridan, WY before the only sushi place within 500 miles closed. But then Ranger Tanya walked out and whew. She was fire.
“The battle for Little Bighorn, why did this battle take place? What events led up to this battle? Where I'd love to begin is in 1492, Columbus sails the ocean blue. A 400-year resistance, up until 1876.”
And she went on from there. Ranger Tanya wasn’t just going to tell us about this battle. She was going to tell us how this battle was just one episode in the centuries long resistance of Native Americans. Like I said. Fire. Among other things, it was a reminder that small acts of resistance matter just as much, and are just as brave, if not more so, as large protests.
The stretch of road we drove from northeastern Wyoming through southeastern Montana, into the Crow Reservation, is also an area that has one of the worst missing or murdered rates for Indigenous women in the country. Something we also spoke about with Ranger Tanya, who had previously worked in law enforcement.
Lily Gladstone also spoke about this in one of her speeches. I’ve been a fan of Gladstone’s ever since seeing Certain Women, which she runs way with. Unknown Country, is also mesmerizing. And Gladstone has another scene stealing guest role on the perfection that is Reservation Dogs. It’s been amazing watching her insist on bringing these stories, and languages, into the mainstream Hollywood press coverage during her Oscar campaign.
Who gets to tell stories, and who we deem worthy of being the subjects of those stories, is something we talked about a lot on the podcast. And something I also tangle with in ENJOY (between the cheese and sex scenes).
There is a Killers of the Flower Moon/Little House connection, by the way. Those of you who’ve read the books will know the disturbing scene near the end of the book Little House on the Prairie, where Laura and her family watch a long line of Native Americans leaving Indian Territory (we go into this scene in some detail in the podcast). They are Osage. (The Ingalls are illegally squatting on the Osage Diminished Reserve, which goes unmentioned the book.) The Osage are relocating to a new reservation in Oklahoma Territory, where, some years later, they will strike oil and, briefly, become one of the wealthiest people on earth. It is this wealth for which they are killed in the “reign of terror,” which is the subject of both the Killers book and the film. Emily and I often thought how Mollie Burkhart Kyle, the real life Osage woman Lily Gladstone portrays, could have been the daughter or granddaughter of the people Laura witnessed leaving their land that day.
All of this is such recent history.
Good Decision: Unknown Country is available to stream and is probably the closest depiction I’ve seen on film to what it is actually like to drive across America.
My mother, born in Sicily & brought in her mother's arms to Ellis Island, was the first in her family to graduate from college. She became a teacher whose first assignment was the Tuscarora reservation in the Buffalo, NY area. This young woman whose first language was Italian (and who learned to speak flawless English) was charged with delivering "white" American cultural education to the Indigenous people. Huh.
i loved listening to and learning from your podcast! the books and laura herself were so, so special to me as a kid. it’s a different thing entirely as an adult but still, i can’t get enough.