Lynne Scott Constantine
Digital Photomontage, 2024. 18” x 24”
“Road to Oz” developed from an arcane fact about North Carolina’s tourist industry. From 1970 to 1980, North Carolina was home to the first (and, I think, only) amusement park dedicated to the characters and stories of The Wizard of Oz, my childhood favorite film.
During my research, I found out that in 2006, two great-grandchildren of L. Frank Baum, author of the perennially popular book series on which the film was based, apologized to members of the Lakota nation for Baum’s role in justifying and even inciting the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, at which at least 300 Lakota men, women and children were killed by members of the Seventh US Cavalry Regiment.
In 1890, Baum was owner and editor of The Saturday Pioneer, a small newspaper in Aberdeen, South Dakota. In an editorial marking the death of Sitting Bull, the Lakota chief who had defeated Custer at Little Bighorn, Baum noted that despite the fact that the US had committed many wrongs against Indian peoples, the task at hand was to exterminate them totally: “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 broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.”
Many see Baum’s Oz writings as a reflection of his more progressive side (he supported women’s right to vote, for example), but others see echoes of his earlier avowed racism in some of the stereotypes inhabiting Oz. Baum may have been a man of his times, as some say, but we live uncomfortably in the conjunction between his beautiful imagination of a remarkable Land of Oz, and his shocking lack of imagination and human feeling.
Image Sources: The two primary images on the left memorialize the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre at two moments: the lower is a photo in the National Archives of a Lakota encampment on the Pine Ridge reservation one month earlier, and the upper is a 1940 photograph of Wounded Knee with the Catholic church that played a central role in the June 1973 uprising by members of the American Indian Movement (AIM). The church was burned to the ground in an act of arson shortly after the AIM actions. In the upper left of the upper panel is a highly manipulated version of the hot-air balloon that appears in the right-side Oz images; in the lower left of the upper image, a manipulated street sign memorializes the pivotal years of 1890 and 1973 at Wounded Knee.
On the right, an infrared image I took on the Outer Banks is enhanced with elements representing my childhood favorite film, The Wizard of Oz. These elements, as well as the other Oz characters represented in the righthand panels, were reproduced and manipulated from the front and back covers of L. Frank Baum’s first Oz book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). The balloon and the logotype injunction to “follow the yellow brick road” are manipulated from the 1970 brochure for the now-defunct Land of Oz Amusement Park at Beech Mountain, NC, where Oz-themed events are still held several times a year. I produced the map segment using Apple Maps.