‘Did you hear,” William Shatner tweeted last week, “about the Laura Ingalls Wilder award being renamed over negative lines on the indigenous people of America? Laura changed the lines in the 50s. I find it disturbing that some take modern opinion and obliterate the past. Isn’t progress … learning from our mistakes?”

In a series of escalating exchanges, Shatner shared his disgust over a recent decision made by the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), to change the name of its Laura Ingalls Wilder award to the Children’s Literature Legacy award. Its unanimous vote to change the name is a significant moment in children’s literature: Wilder and the Little House on the Prairie books are loved and revered in the US, so the decision didn’t come lightly.

As Shatner tweeted, the decision may seem as if it’s the result of modern opinion, a common misconception. He was, in part, correct when he referred to “negative lines” in the story being changed by Wilder in the 1950s; in fact, she changed just one word after a reader wrote to her in 1952 to query a particular line: “There were no people there. Only Indians.”

Weren’t Indians people, the reader asked? Letters to Wilder went first to Ursula Nordstrom, her editor at Harper & Row, who passed on the letter’s feedback to the author. The line was then changed to: “There were no settlers there. Only Indians.”

That reader had an awareness Wilder and Nordstrom lacked. Were they a Native American parent or teacher? Someone who taught Native American children? Or just someone who recognised that Wilder’s story cast Native Americans as more animal-like than human?

There are many other words in Wilder’s books that could have been changed to reflect the humanity of indigenous people. They were far from the primitive creatures who yip and howl in her work. The Indigenous Nations who were in Indian Territory in Wilder’s time were there as the outcome of diplomatic negotiations between their leaders and those of the US. With diplomacy in mind, it is clear many people share Wilder’s views – whether in 1935 when she published her first book or in 1952 when that reader wrote that letter.

William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) What about words today- geek, nerd, etc... what if they are the slurs of tomorrow? I don’t want my books getting denounced because those words are acceptable words right now. That’s my issue. https://t.co/BaygCT3Set

“It’s not that I want the award name reversed,” Shatner later tweeted, after several lengthy and fiery exchanges with librarians and academics. “I agree with the reasoning; not the method it was carried out. An author who cannot defend herself was inadvertently judged in 2018 for a viewpoint from 1867.”

Does Shatner’s interest in the prize change lie in the parallels between Laura Ingalls Wilder stories of her family’s life on a frontier and the ones Gene Roddenberry told in Star Trek? Shatner’s Captain Kirk did intone that space was “the final frontier”, where he and his crew would “boldly go where no man has gone before”. Or does Shatner’s irritation at the change to the award’s name also suggest that it is, like the anger directed at changes to sports team logos or statues in town squares, rooted in a resistance to reckon with the US’s history of mistreating indigenous and black people?

Times change. With social media, people of marginalised groups the world over have begun to speak to wider audiences. Their objections to being misrepresented were always around, but now they have visibility. So now monuments are coming down, and award names are being changed. This is important action. While the ALSC’s change may seem like a small one, confined to the world of children’s literature, it is of great significance to the world. The stories any society tells its children have tremendous potential to shape how they behave as adults.

In one episode of Star Trek, Kirk is surprised to find that the inhabitants of far-flung planet Omega IV have a US flag and a copy of its constitution. Landing in the middle of a war between the Yangs and Kohms – alien versions of Yankees and communists – Kirk tells the Yangs they have slurred the meaning of the words “We, the people”. Those words, he says, apply to all people. If Shatner would reflect on those words when commenting on this change, he might see it as a a new opportunity to do right by all people.