By Tim Giago (Nanwica Kciji)
© 2009 Native Sun News
October 12, 2009
Bruce Dancis, in his Video Patrol column wrote, "The Wizard of Oz has become so ingrained in the American psyche that today, 70 years after it was first released by MGM, the movie continues to inspire wonderment, laughter and tears."
Of the 70th Anniversary airing of the show, CBS Anchorwoman, Katie Couric gushed, "I will probably watch it again for the 150th time."
When the movie was released in 1939, it was indeed a wonder. It was an exciting children's fantasy movie with vivid colors, great songs, and it was a movie with a message. Should this great movie be tainted by the racial sins of the man who wrote the book, L. Frank Baum?
Baum and Adolph Hitler had one thing in common: both called for the genocidal extermination of a race of people; Hitler the Jews, and Baum, the Sioux people of South Dakota.
In an editorial written six days after 300 Lakota men, women and children were massacred at Wounded Knee, Baum wrote, "Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth."
Baum followed that editorial with another. He wrote, "The whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit is broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are."
Fifty years later, another man set out to "annihilate" a race of people. Adolph Hitler did manage to exterminate six million Jews before the roof caved in on him. Hitler also wrote a book called Mein Kampf. In the book he wrote, "Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body - often dazzled by the sudden light - a Kike."
For arguments sake, suppose an enterprising producer had made a movie based on Mein Kampf. Would that movie carry the stigma of the author? Perhaps, but critics would argue that Hitler actually accomplished some of his mission in exterminating the Jews, while L. Frank Baum only editorialized about it. But there is no difference in their message. Both called for the genocidal extermination of a race of people.
Then why is L. Frank Baum so loved while Hitler so eternally hated? Suppose the book Mein Kampf was actually a children's book about a fantasyland in the Bavarian Alps. And further suppose that the book was then made into a movie that was highly acclaimed. Would the fact that Hitler wrote the book and that he also called for genocide against the Jews diminish the popularity of the movie? There are probably a plethora of answers to these rhetorical questions. Could it be that the lives of the Jews were more important than the lives of the Indians? After all, the Indians stood in the path of Manifest Destiny and therefore it was God's will that they be removed or eliminated. That makes it alright in the minds of most Americans.
But no matter how you cut it, genocide is genocide. If you read the words as written by L. Frank Baum, and then read them again, his words are no different than those of Adolph Hitler when he called for the annihilation or extermination of the Jewish race.
I would encourage Katie Couric and all of the other news people of note who fall all over themselves in recalling the wonders of the Wizard of Oz, to take some time to read the published editorials of L. Frank Baum and I can guarantee that when Katie sees the Wizard of Oz for the 150th time, she will see it in a different light.
No one in America can better understand the correlation of the words of Adolph Hitler and those of L. Frank Baum, than the American Indian. There are many powerful Jews in America who not only fail to see the difference, but are actively promoting the film.
If the news people of America understood fair play, they would at least investigate and report on the genocidal proclamations of Mr. Baum. I wrote about him on the front page of USA Today in December of 1990 and I did not see one follow-up by any other media. Would the media protect this scoundrel simply because he wrote a book that became a lovable movie?
(Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, is the publisher of Native Sun News. He was the founder and first president of the Native American Journalists Association, the 1985 recipient of the H. L. Mencken Award, and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard with the Class of 1991. Giago was inducted into the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2008. He can be reached at editor@nsweekly.com)
http://www.chitowndailynews.org/The_City_Desk/Quinn_signs_sterilization_bill,31271
At least things are starting to change... but, as you well know, the sterilzation of women is not new to the First Nations people and Siouxicide has reached epidemic proportions...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBrYdu7HXdg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXIQifruK08
The following is the beginning of a series...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVhE3Muh3co
It is essential that we review these aspects of history so that we don't continue repeating it. Such programs are not necessary as nature has its own way of balancing itself without such measures. Affordable health care is indeed possible and we have plenty of resources. We need only apply our creativity and be willing to make the necessary changes that will allow all of us to live with abundance.
Thank you for bringing attention to these issues. ~ Jules
What do you know of the relationship between the Episcopalian church... particularly the Scotch-Irish... and Native Americans? I'm beginning to possibly see a pattern here that my also be connected to my own grandmother. I recently learned that there was an Indian Boarding School in Albuquerque. I don't know anything for certain yet... but I have a long and growing list of questions... that include her ancestry... as well as my own. Just when I think that my situation could not get any more complex... something else reveals itself to suggest that there were an incredible number of secrets hidden in my family... and I was very nearly disposed of perhaps with the intention of keeping them hidden. There are simply too many things involving my family that make no sense and suggest that there is much more to be revealed. Some of it is forthcoming as I write this... and contrary to what any of the other posters say... this is not only about history... but continues to have a great impact on a great many people.
If you have any insights regarding my question... I would be most interested in hearing them.
First, I acknowledge that I don't have in my immediate family history the kind of horror and pain involved with those descended from people massacred at Wounded Knee, and I recognize that my perceptions about this will be different as a result. And I acknowledge that these words of Baum's are absolutely horrifying.
But I feel the need to respond to one of your rhetorical questions:
"Then why is L. Frank Baum so loved while Hitler so eternally hated?"
I think that the difference is that Hitler spent an adult lifetime doing everything he could to see that genocide carried out, versus providing some editorial commentary in a newspaper in the midst of a conflict.
Beyond that, I have a question of my own:
How can the same person write magical books about utopias where minorities are respected and then turn around write calling for his neighbors' genocide?
I truly find these quotes of his mystifying -- they seem so out of character with what else I know about his creative, intellectual, spiritual, and social theories.
For me, rather than looking at these words of hatred and therefore condemning/abandoning everything else he wrote (thousands of pages versus paragraphs), I wonder if we might maybe find some wisdom and insight is by asking ourselves how such dichotomies can live in our psyches and looking at him more closely, because I think any of us are potentially capable of the same schism.
How can we learn from Baum's mistakes?
http://www.online-literature.com/baum/
Another very good example of this can be found with Ellen G. White, founder of the Adventist religion, who believed that the mixing of races was sufficient to cause the extinction of all human beings. In reviewing the history of Ellen G. White, as well as carefully looking at her photograph, she herself was of mixed race... notably Black and Native American...
http://www.whiteestate.org/issues/genealogy.html
Additionally... her prophecies and visions regarding gods with celestial origins was most likely the result of seizures as she suffered an early childhood head injury...
http://www.whiteestate.org/issues/visions.html
http://www.ellenwhiteexposed.com/egw49.htm
It is not my intention to attack any particular religion. However... we must realize the far reaching influences that these outdated belief systems continue to impact us. Particularly since such training begins at a very early age.... quite often its influence goes unrecognized. And the truth of the matter is that in killing off any one group of people we are quite often killing off one of our own as a result of our unrecognized and unacknowledged ancestry!
Context doesn't absolve Baum's conclusions, which are accurately reprinted above. No doubt, the conclusion that the annihilation of the Lakota is unconscionable, and Baum was wrong to promote it. However, the analogy to Hitler is not valid for a couple of reasons:
Baum seems to be extolling the Indians' previously noble nature, and saying they were now so broken at that it would be better to put them out of their misery than continue to keep them shackled to reservations. In fact his entire first editorial can be read as a eulogy of the rebellious Sitting Bull, against whom he compares the remaining Lakota unfavorably.
Wrong as he was to suggest annihilation (sarcastically or not), Baum's motivations are clearly not the same Hitler's, and the situation of American frontiersmen and Indians was not the same as that of the Nazis and the Jews. To equate them does both tragedies a disservice.
The conflict between Europeans and Native Americans was a threefold conflict of genetics (lack of immunity to European diseases), civilizations (a highly centralized agricultural civilization versus a mostly decentralized, hunter-gatherer society) and technology. In contrast, the Jews of Europe were fully integrated into their respective societies, albeit with distinctive cultural traditions.
One HAS to wonder, given the FACT that the Sioux slaughtered at Wounded Knee were flying a flag of TRUCE... just how much DID Baum's editorial incite those who committed the atrocity in question?
The following is from James Mooney, "The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890," in Fourteenth Annual Report of the United States Bureau of Ethnology (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1896) Part Two, p. 877 and is part of an eye-witness account of what happened...
"...Right near the flag of truce a mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing, and that especially was a very sad sight. The women as they were fleeing with their babes were killed together, shot right through, and the women who were very heavy with child were also killed...After most all of them had been killed a cry was made that all those who were not killed or wounded should come forth and they would be safe. Little boys who were not wounded came out of their places of refuge, and as soon as they came in sight a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them there..."
The survivor recounting the events at Wounded Knee was white.
Don't forget that the supposedly marvelous leader Winston Churchill had nothing but scorn for the Irish and wanted to keep India a colony.
Other dichotomies:
Stalin led the USSR through WWII, after killing 20 million of his own people.
Mao established modern China and sought to destroy the Tibetan culture.
Are we just doomed or something?
The Wizard of Oz is more than just the Frank L. Baum stories - the movie has made a far greater impact on our consciousness than the books and the movie is a product of more than just one person, one perspective.
The sins of Frank L Baum in editorializing about genocide for the Sioux aren't the same as the sins of Hitler with Mein Kampf. Mein Kampf became an organizing principle for Nazi conquest and genocide - Frank L Baum's editorials were forgotten (probably in the noise of other, similarily forgotten editorials.)
Life isn't black and white. It isn't even grey, although that would make our choices so much easier.
Can you present any references for Baum's editorials? While I believe that you are correct about Baum, there remains in my mind the suspicion that his solution for the Sioux might have been akin to Swift's solution for the Irish, and I I'd like to evaluate that for myself.
I would. I believe in telling the whole story, not just the parts that make us feel good.
I should have said:
Would you eschew the advances and benefits of Western Civilization for the horrors of it's past wars, pogroms, and such like?
It's been a LONG time since I've used "eschew". I just couldn't resist.