Much like the peripatetic Ingalls family, “Little House on the Prairie” has been on a journey these last few years.

The name of the book’s author, Laura Ingalls Wilder, was stripped from a children’s literature award in 2018 over her portrayals of Indigenous characters as “savages,” and her semi-autobiographical novels of frontier life were among the works reassessed for racial stereotypes after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. From the right, no sooner did Netflix announce plans to revive the story as a series than the podcaster Megyn Kelly warned the streamer not to “woke-ify” it.

What it would mean to “woke-ify” this material in Kelly’s mind I leave to you to guess. The 1974-83 NBC series that set up camp in Gen X’s memories already updated Wilder’s story with plenty of socially conscious plotlines on racism, misogyny, antisemitism, sexual assault and more.

Regardless, the new “Little House,” now streaming on Netflix, arrives with a horse-drawn-wagonload of cultural freight, which also includes the vogue for retrogressive “tradwife” fantasies; Taylor Sheridan’s bloody mythologizing of the West; and a whole bunch of 250th-birthday debate over what exactly went into “making America,” and whether it’s polite to acknowledge it.

The actual series, created by Rebecca Sonnenshine, is more or less the show you’d expect, if not the one culture warriors like Kelly might want. It is a spirited, wholesome story of adventure and hardship, broadened to consider the people who lived on the prairie long before the Ingallses and company came to homestead it.

But your childhood story has not been turned into “Deadwood.” Slightly Hallmark-coded and marginally less prettified than the NBC original, this new “Little House” is at heart the least remarkable thing in TV today — one more piece of repurposed I.P. — made notable mostly by the prairie tinderbox of cultural brush fires into which it arrives.

At the center is Laura, given a feisty spark by Alice Halsey; we first meet her drawing a bead on a rabbit with a slingshot. Her Pa, Charles (Luke Bracey), trades Michael Landon’s clean-shaven granola sunshine for a leaner aspect and a trim beard that would fit in at your local ax-throwing bar, but he retains his good cheer (and his fiddle). Older sister Mary (Skywalker Hughes) remains Laura’s obedient counterpart; their Ma, Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald), is a more outspoken helpmeet.

In other words, they are a typical TV family by the standards of 2026, which mirrors the appeal of the NBC classic — watching recognizable kids and parents move to a new home and deal with lean times, moral struggles and the many ways that nature can kill you. (Among these: drowning, wolves, disease, wildfires and “bad air” at the bottom of a well.)

What’s different are the neighbors. The first local the family meets is Dr. George Tann (Jocko Sims), an African American physician, who makes a brief appearance as an object of fascination to Laura in Wilder’s novel. (“He was so very black,” Wilder writes. “She would have been afraid of him if she had not liked him so much.”) A Black woman, Emily Henderson (Barrett Doss), runs the general store in nearby Independence, Kan.

The biggest introduction is a neighboring Osage family as a parallel to the Ingallses. William Mitchell (Meegwun Fairbrother), who bonds with Charles, is resigned about white settlers but hopes to stake out his own home among them; his wife, White Sun (Alyssa Wapanatahk), is far more skeptical. Their daughter, Good Eagle (Wren Zhawenim Gotts), becomes close friends with Laura, who is smitten with her at first sight. The families become intertwined, even as their people are pitted against each other by forces who stand to profit from expansion.

Is this “woke-ifying”? Call it what you want; not including Native characters here would be a conspicuous choice in an era of rich Indigenous stories like “Reservation Dogs” and “Dark Winds.” And it’s the most interesting aspect of a familiar series, giving the underlying conflicts — assimilation versus separation, negotiation versus resistance — multiple voices.

The differences among versions are striking in a key scene taken from the novel, in which two Osage men show up unannounced at the Ingallses’ cabin while Charles is away, taking food and tobacco. The 1974 NBC pilot plays the incident up for menace and chills (though it also treats the dislocation of Native inhabitants with some sympathy).

In Sonnenshine’s version, Laura (who in the novel wants to turn her dog loose to attack the intruders) gives a friendly greeting and offers the men cornbread; Caroline — wary from having witnessed violence between Native people and settlers in Minnesota — tells them, “Take whatever you want and go.”

But it’s the dialogue between the two men, missing from earlier versions, that’s most revealing. When one begins grabbing food, the other tells him he’s being greedy. His companion counters that the settlers moved onto their land and cut their trees for housing: “You call it greedy. I call it fair.” It’s a small-scale rendition of a conversation that the Native characters have throughout the season. What is justice? Can anything material really compensate for the loss of one’s home?

The question of whether all this is “faithful” is a wild-goose chase. Faithful to what? The original Wilder books were fiction, though based on her childhood. And the NBC series did not adapt her “Little House on the Prairie” at all, except for the movie-length pilot; the series picked up from Wilder’s novel “On the Banks of Plum Creek.”

The nostalgic debt is even more complicated when you’re talking about a 2020s successor to a 1970s adaptation of a 1930s children’s novel set in the 1800s. (ABC also aired a “Little House” mini-series in 2005.) It’s memories of memories of memories. But history, once fictionalized, is ultimately about the present. Declaring further revisions off limits is more about control than verisimilitude.

In any event, it’s not only the Native characters who have changed. The neighbor Mr. Edwards (Warren Christie), a jolly ne’er-do-well in the NBC version, is now a bittersweet figure, haunted by his experience in the Civil War. The scars of the war on all the adult characters, and the society they live in, are far more overt here.

Still, the show dispenses familiar “Little House” themes like peppermint sticks from a jar. Where the NBC series had the snooty Oleson family, Netflix has Jemma James (Mary Holland), the haughty wife of the railroad man who lured settlers like Charles to Kansas, and her mean-girl daughters. There is Christmas and dancing and homespun wisdom about not judging people before you know them.

The more grown-up themes sneak in around the margins or hide in plain sight, as in the name of the settlement, Independence. Self-reliance is a recurrent dream of pioneer tales, and this “Little House” sees it as little more than a clapboard facade. “It is a myth that men can make it out here alone,” Dr. Tann tells Charles in the first episode. “It’s a pretty story. Nothing more.”

Of course, myths and pretty stories help build nations, and conquer them, and construct narratives afterward. Netflix’s “Little House on the Prairie” is, mostly, the mildly reformulated bowl of sunshine it’s advertised as, but it is also conscious that it is a story of creation.

After all, as Edwards asks Charles, with an edge of bitterness, “Isn’t that what we’re here for? To make a new America, whatever that may be?”