The Story Behind Mount RushmoreMount Rushmore, in South Dakota, is promoted for the carvings of the four presidents on the face of the mountain: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, said to have decided the destiny of the United States and its people. But facts are stubborn things and they tell another story.
The mountain that was chosen for the site of the
monument is known as "The Six Grandfathers" (Tȟuŋkášila
Šákpe) by Lakota peoples, named
after the Earth, the Sky, and the four directions. It is a sacred place, and the land around it is unceded Indigenous territory. The seven tribes of the Great Sioux Nation never agreed to sign away their rights to this land; the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1868, which the tribes did sign, guaranteed them "undisturbed use and occupation" of the land the Six Grandfathers, or Mount Rushmore, is on. Just nine years later, the United States government broke the treaty and violently seized the Black Hills (Pahá Sápa in Lakota) in order to mine for gold and other resources. Many attempts to hold the U.S. government accountable have been tried, including a 1970 protest where 23 Indigenous activists climbed to the top of the monument. In 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court finally agreed with the Great Sioux Nation, ruling that the land was illegally taken, and they granted the Nation $102 million in a trust. The trust is now worth over $1 billion, but the money has not been collected. The tribes refuse the money because to collect it would equate to a sales transaction, one that they never consented to. Oglala Lakota Sioux President Julian Bear Runner called for the monument's removal on June 30. Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Chairman Harold Fraizer did the same on June 25.[1] It is not a coincidence that Trump spoke at Mount Rushmore on July 3. The sculptures of the four presidents were created by a man called Gutzon Borglum who "fretted about a 'mongrel horde' overrunning the 'Nordic' purity of the West," which is what Trump repeated on July 3. Borglum is also quoted as saying, "I would not trust an Indian, off-hand, 9 out of 10, where I would not trust a white man 1 out of 10." Borglum is known to have been associated with the Ku Klux Klan, "an organization which was reborn in a torch-light ceremony atop Stone Mountain in Georgia, in 1915."[2] Borglum was also hired to build a Confederate statue on Stone Mountain, named for Confederate General Stonewall Jackson which to this day remains a symbol for the KKK, defenders of the Confederacy and slave power and other state-organized racist forces. There is no proof that Borglum officially joined the Klan, which helped fund the Mount Rushmore project, but "he nonetheless became deeply involved in Klan politics," writes John Taliaferro who wrote the history of Mount Rushmore.[3] Protests rejecting efforts to divide and divert the people and upholding the rights of all have been organized at both Mount Rushmore and Stone Mountain. Efforts are being made to rename Stone Mountain and remove the carving celebrating the Confederacy. Militant protests took place against Trump and the state-organized racist attacks and dispossession of the Indigenous peoples at Mount Rushmore on July 3.
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