LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) -- Critics of "Wizard of Oz'' creator L. Frank Baum say a proposed Oz theme park would be inappropriate because the author was a racist who called for the "total annihilation'' of native Americans. In editorials written in the early 1890s, a decade before the first of his Oz books appeared, Baum called for the extermination of American Indians. "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,'' he wrote in 1891 while publisher of The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer in South Dakota. The editorial appeared shortly after the massacre at Wounded Knee. Jimmie Oyler, the self-described chief of the United Tribe of Shawnee Indians, says it would be wrong to build the projected 6,000-acre park on land that used to belong to his tribe. "He more or less said 'kill them all,''' Oyler said. "If it has anything to do with Baum ... it's never going to be on Shawnee land.''
Kristin McCallum, a spokeswoman for Oz Entertainment Co., which plans to build the park near Kansas City for an estimated $860 million, called the 110-year-old editorials irrelevant. "I don't see the relation,'' she said. Oz Entertainment is negotiating with state and federal agencies to obtain state-owned land in exchange for a commitment to spend $45 million cleaning up the land, a former army munitions plant. University of Kansas professor Joe Reitz says the project honoring characters including Dorothy, The Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion should be reconsidered. "To build a monument to a man who advocated genocide among Native Americans in this part of the country seems to be financially suicidal,'' Reitz said. "If you give people a reason not to spend money, they probably won't do it.''
Historian Nancy Koupal, director of research and publishing at the South Dakota State Historical Society, which recently published a book, Baum's Road to Oz: The Dakota Years, said Baum was concerned for his safety when he wrote the editorials and that genocide was not a theme he returned to in later writings. "It was not a deeply felt conviction,'' she said. "You scratch any of your heroes, you're not going to like what you find in the closet.''
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