As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence this month, Netflix will premiere an adaptation of "Little House on the Prairie" – a story grounded in U.S. history that's been popular with many generations of Americans.

Author Laura Ingalls Wilder debuted the first book in her "Little House" series in 1932, sharing her family's life in the 1800s American Midwest. Multiple screen adaptations followed the book series, with the most notable being NBC's TV show that aired from 1974-1983, starring Michael Landon as Wilder's father, Charles Ingalls.

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The new Netflix series, set to premiere July 9, is a fresh look at a story that Amy Fatzinger, an associate professor and interim head of the Department for American Indian Studies, knows well. Fatzinger is an expert on the ways in which Native Americans are represented in popular media, particularly film. She has studied the "Little House" story and its adaptations for decades, including for her doctoral dissertation in American Indian studies.

In this Q&A, Fatzinger discusses the decisions Wilder faced when writing the original series and how viewers can watch the new show with a critical eye.

Q: What did the original "Little House on the Prairie" get wrong about Indigenous representation?

A: These are really complex issues, because she was writing a highly autobiographical version of her life story, but it was fictionalized, too. She did some creative work as a fiction writer while she was writing her story.

Initially, when I started working on my dissertation and first revisited the books as an adult, my first paper I wrote was looking at all the things that Wilder did wrong, so she has some quotes in there that are definitely controversial; for example, saying that the one character says "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." Her father, however, contrasts that, so if you look back at the text, you see a more complex picture emerging where only certain characters who serve as foils to main characters say the controversial remarks, and they're usually counteracted and challenged by other characters. 

She had basically four options: omit Native people altogether, only focus on positive portrayals, only focus on negative portrayals, or create some kind of a complicated mix. And I'd say she went for this fourth option: some positive things, some negative things, and that gives contemporary adapters a lot to work with as they work to modernize the story for new audiences.

Q: What responsibility does a reboot or an adaptation or popular media generally have when revisiting this history?

A: Many people expect that an adaptation of a work is going to try to replicate the novel, the source text, as closely as possible, and that's usually not the goal of an adaptation. But the greater the fan base, the greater the love the original story, the more pressure and expectation the creative adapting team is going to have in terms of modernizing this story for a new audience. There's another element here where we have a lot of critics of Wilder's work, and the way she handled Native content and other content around people of color in her source text. 

It's very likely the adapters will try to improve upon that in some way, but as they do so, they're in difficult territory, because this is actual frontier history and someone's autobiographical narrative to a large extent. So, it's a very tall order. What I'd be hoping to see in the adaptation is that the creators treat the story that Wilder told about the frontier and her family's experience on it with all the complexity that it deserves, and not try to oversimplify the themes around race and culture the way some of the earlier adaptation adaptations of the Little House story have done.

Q: What tips do you, as an expert, have for viewers who want to watch the new show with a more critical eye? What questions should we, as viewers, be asking of the show's portrayal of Native Americans as we watch it?

A: It doesn't surprise me that "Little House on the Prairie" is being adapted again in 2026 because this is the 250th anniversary of the forming of the United States in 1992 when we celebrated the 500-year anniversary of the "discovery" of the Americas. You also saw a surge of historical films and media that invited us to reflect on this complex history. So, this is a time when the adaptation could invite Americans and other viewers around the world to think about American history in new ways.

What I'd suggest that viewers look at and look for is whether the story is being told about the American frontier in ways that reflect accurately all of its complexities. I'd be hoping to see that the adaptation seeks to tell Wilder's own life story in a way that is faithful to her story and her family's experience on the frontier, and not simply rewriting or simplifying her story so that it's more comfortable for the modern viewer.