White South Dakotans are still enamored of an editorial written in 1891 by L. Frank Baum in the Aberdeen Saturday (SD) newspaper calling for genocide against the remaining Sioux population after the massacre at Wounded Knee when he wrote, “perhaps we should wrong them one more time and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.” He must have been thinking about that comment when we wrote the flying monkey scene is his book The Wizard of Oz 10 years later.
2 comments:
Does Giago make some salient points? Absolutely. But he weakens his own argument when he says "White South Dakotans are still enamored of an editorial..." Anytime you make an emphatic statement about an entire group of people, you lose credibility. He really didn't need to do that to make his larger point about the prevailing cultural and political winds in South Dakota.
Yes, he probably should've inserted the word "some" or "many" in front of "white South Dakotans." But I think it's understood. When you generalize, you're referring to a group characteristic that applies to many but not all the people in the group. Generally speaking, that is.
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