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THE BAD CANON - L. FRANK BAUM

What is it about white guys with imagination being filled with hate? Nearly everyone was a bigot in the nineteenth century, but you would think that the men who had the vision to come up with Mickey Mouse and the car and a fucking chocolate-themed amusement park might have enough imagination to recognize that genocide is bad. L. Frank Baum was no different. He was the editor of the Saturday Pioneer, which, though it sounds like a sex act, was actually his weekly Aberdeen, South Dakota-based platform for publishing comics and calling for the extermination of Native Americans, which he did. Several times.

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The editorials are strange. The first begins as an obituary for Sitting Bull. It even sounds as though Baum had some respect for him, as he pays Sitting Bull the ultimate white-guy compliment of saying he's like a white guy. He eulogizes that "he was an Indian with a white man's spirit of hatred and revenge for those who had wronged him and his." Considering the context, it's remarkable that Baum goes on to acknowledge the destruction that Europeans wrought on the Native Americans. But after that, Baum calls for the death of all Native Americans, because he established that Sitting Bull was the last with any "spirit," whatever the hell that means. Like any journalist, I'm sure Baum spent plenty of time with all the different Native American tribes in the US at the time. In his numerous interactions with them, interactions that were filled with as much chat about their children and good food as it was with spread of disease, Baum came to the well-reasoned conclusion that the last good Indian was Sitting Bull and that the rest should die.

The second editorial called again for genocide, nine days before the Wounded Knee Massacre, in which hundreds of Lakota were killed. It too is upsetting, though it's slightly more complicated than simply being the editorial version of "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." Baum's reasons for calling for the battle acknowledge that "Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong." For the benefit of any comatose amoeba who can't see where this is going , the rest of the sentence is: "and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth." The nuance it took to recognize that the Native Americans had been wronged for centuries is, of course, immediately undone by the second half of the sentence. It's a fucked up dichotomy, like Baum picked the history teacher's joke "D" answer on a test (the answer where she put "Ran out of donuts" as one of the causes of the Civil War), if the history teacher had an incredibly dark sense of humor. Except Baum wasn't joking.

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What should the US do to right the hundreds of years of wrongs perpetrated against Native Americans?

A. Provide more government opportunities for assistance.

B. Give them their land back (for real this time).

C. Create and issue a national apology.

D. Kill all of them.

The second piece, the Wounded Knee editorial, is below, with some minor changes for effect.

"The peculiar policy of the government in employing so weak and vacillating a person as General Miles to look after the uneasy Munchkins, has resulted in a terrible loss of blood to our soldiers, and a battle which, at best, is a disgrace to the war department. There has been plenty of time for prompt and decisive measures, the employment of which would have prevented this disaster.

The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Munchkins. 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. In this lies safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the Munchkins as those have been in the past."

Yep, it's even more upsetting this way. Why? Because everyone is a terrible person, and at this point we subjugate little people in a far more public sense than we do Native Americans. Anything for 18 to 49 year olds, right, TLC?

A year later, Aberdeen's Rusty Trombone folded. A decade after that, Baum wrote The Wizard Of Oz.

Ah, America. There's no place like home.

SARAH ROSENSHINE