No, We Are Definitely Not in Kansas Anymore

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By Annette McGivney

November 30, 2024

Guest Opinion. As a young child, I was terrified by the wicked witch of the West in the Hollywood adaptation of Frank L. Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. The witch’s long pointed chin, green face, sinister cackle, and the way she zoomed across the sky was the stuff of nightmares.

But as an adult who has researched and written about the United States’ relationship with North America’s first inhabitants, it is Baum himself who haunts me. It doesn’t take much digging to discover that the beloved children’s book author who wrote The Wizard of Oz in 1900 also promoted genocidal campaigns against Native Americans. 

“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,” wrote Baum in in 1890, a decade before The Wizard of Oz was released. Baum ran a newspaper at that time called the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. “Why not annihilation?,” he continued. “Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.”

The editorial was published on December 20, 1890, nine days before the Wounded Knee Massacre took place not far from the settlement of Aberdeen where Baum was living. Lakota families had ventured off the Pine Ridge reservation and camped at Wounded Knee Creek while they were participating in a religious Ghost Dance ritual to try and connect with deceased relatives and summon spiritual forces that would send the European invaders “back across the ocean.” The dancing made the Dakota Territory settlers nervous and soon the US 7th Calvary Regiment got involved. 

On the morning of December 29, after a stray gunshot came from the Lakota camp, the soldiers opened fire on the mostly unarmed group. An estimated 250-300 Lakota men, women and children were killed, many shot in the back as they ran. Congressional Medals of Honor were awarded to 20 soldiers involved in the assault. 

While Baum’s violent language may seem shocking by 21st Century standards, he was merely echoing a widely accepted viewpoint of the day held not only by frontier settlers but by government leaders. In 1873, General William T. Sherman wrote: “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children…During an assault, the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.” 

Theodore Roosevelt famously stated in an 1886 speech: “I don’t go so far as to think the only good Indians are the dead Indians but I believe nine out of every 10 are.” Five years later, Roosevelt became the 26th president of the United States, running on a platform that celebrated white pioneer grit and demonized the land’s original inhabitants.

And now Americans have elected their 47th president who said last April during an interview with Time: “I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country…I don't think it would be a very tough thing to address, frankly. But I think the laws are very unfair right now…If you look right now, there’s absolutely a bias against white people and that’s a problem.” 

This is only one in an endless stream of racist, xenophobic, sexist and generally hateful comments from Trump. But my heartbreak over the election of this man to the most powerful position in the world does not have to do with him. Trump is just a carnival barker. I am heartbroken over what the election reveals about us as a country. 

America is currently home to approximately 748 billionaires, one of whom is now president, and 86 percent of whom are male. In 1990 there were just 66 billionaires. Meanwhile, income inequality in the United States is higher than in other advanced economies, according to a Pew Research Center report, with a significantly larger gap between rich and poor than in the UK, Italy, Japan, Canada, Germany or France.

No doubt, many people who voted for Trump did it out of desperation or exasperation after living paycheck to paycheck in a country with a nearly non-existent social safety net. But what triumphed in the presidential race was this: Hate, racism, fear, greed and the othering of people who are different from ourselves. This includes people thumbing their noses at Trump supporters. 

Confronting this truth can be terrifying. But I also find the current situation a relief because now we can actually address the problem instead of stating in zombie like fashion, “this is not who we are,” every time something abhorrent happens that does not align with America’s lofty image of itself. 

The popular origin story of the United States tells of independent-minded colonists who fought to break free from the shackles of an oppressive English monarchy. And through their heroic struggle for freedom, a new democratic form of government was born. But that is not the whole story, or even the real story. The engine behind the founding and continued expansion of the United States was an insatiable appetite for land, whether it was from wealthy land speculators such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson or poor European immigrants seeking a new start in life. Democratic principles took a back seat in this campaign while a government-sanctioned system of settler colonialism prevailed. 

Historian and author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes that “settler colonialism requires a genocidal policy…People do not hand over their land, resources, children and futures without a fight, and that fight is met with violence. In employing the force necessary to accomplish its expansionist goals, a colonizing regime institutionalizes violence.” 

Dunbar-Ortiz goes on to argue that “US history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the 20th century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systemic military occupations removal of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, forced removal of Native American children to military-like boarding schools, allotment and a policy of termination.” 

During four centuries of land theft, which some historians refer to as a “holocaust,” the indigenous population of North America went from a conservative estimate of at least five million in 1492 to fewer than 238,000 at the close of the 19th century. Countless Native Americans died from diseases brought by European immigrants, but many also perished from starvation and extermination campaigns carried out by the US government and state-sponsored vigilante groups. Historian Donald L. Fixico writes that the US government authorized “over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its Indigenous people.” 

Our attempts to deny the violence that is part of the DNA of the United States and simultaneously elevate grand myths about American exceptionalism has become dangerously toxic. It is like black mold growing in damp sheetrock. It does not go away with time. The rot continues to fester no matter how much we paint over it.

So is it any surprise that we have twice elected a reality TV star as president who ran on a platform of othering vulnerable populations? Or that the richest person in the world will be his new sidekick in managing the new regime? Until we take a sledgehammer to that moldy sheetrock and address America’s original sins of genocide, land theft and slavery, we will continue to elevate political leaders who are morally bankrupt.

“Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race,” wrote Martin Luther King in his 1963 book Why We Can’t Wait. “Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society…We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode.”

As we look ahead to the next four years and the resolve that will be required to protect the vulnerable populations Trump promised to attack, we must also have the courage to look back and atone for the violence upon which the nation was founded. This means pushing against government attempts to punish people for being “woke” or teaching critical race theory. It requires supporting independent presses (like Torrey House!) and news organizations that elevate indigenous voices and seek to dismantle the revisionist, Wizard of Oz version of American history.

And for those of us whose ancestors came to North America by choice rather than in chains, it is time to embrace the fact that we as settlers are guests in someone else’s home. Regardless of what environmental assaults the Trump administration wages, we must support Indigenous-led efforts to protect Native American sacred sites on public lands. And, when asked, we can lend a hand to America’s first inhabitants in a vast array of other needs ranging from addressing boarding school traumas to building reservation infrastructure to the return of land wherever possible.   

Despite what Trump has claimed, America will never be great again. Because it was never that great in the first place—at least not from a social justice perspective. But if we finally confront our violent history, we can make America great at last. 

As Martin Luther King said in his monumental “I Have a Dream” speech: “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.”

Annette McGivney is a journalist based in Colorado who is descended from Irish, Scottish and English heritage. She writes frequently for the Guardian on Indigenous and environmental issues.