The victims of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee are loaded up on carts for burial. Photo from Wikipedia

The Editor Who Called for the Extermination of the Sioux
By Tim Giago (Nanwica Kciji)

When the movie “The Wizard of Oz” 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, but should this movie be tainted by the genocidal sins of the man who wrote “The Wizard of Oz”; L. Frank Baum?

Baum and Adolph Hitler had one thing in common: both called for the 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 on December 29, 1890, Baum wrote in the Aberdeen (SD) Saturday Review, "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."

Read the rest of the story on the all new Native Sun News website: The Editor Who Called for the Extermination of the Sioux

(Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, is the retired 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 and into the Native American Journalists Hall of Fame in 2013. He can be reached at unitysodak1@vastbb.net)

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