The faces of four US Presidents gaze out from a granite mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota. For some, Mount Rushmore is hailed as the “sanctuary of democracy”. For Native Americans, the monument is generally considered a sanctuary of illegal occupation.
Thus, while Mount Rushmore attracts some 3 million visitors annually as a tourist destination, it has also been the site of numerous Native American demonstrations and occupations. Among the most remarkable of the 20e century, were in 1970 and 1971, when Native American activists climbed and then occupied Mount Rushmore to protest what they said was the theft and desecration of a spiritual site.
The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868
Signing of a treaty between William T. Sherman and the Sioux in a tent at Fort Laramie, 1868.
Bettmann Archives / Getty Images
Tribes such as the Shoshone, Salish, Kootenai Crow, Mandan, Arikara, and Lakota have long lived around the Black Hills, a shrine the Lakota call “The Heart of All That Is.” Indigenous people knew the land centuries before whites ever saw it, says Gerard Baker, a Mandan-Hidatsa Indian who served as superintendent at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial from 2004 to 2010.
The Black Hills were reserved for the Lakota (also known as the Teton Sioux) in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. But the discovery of gold in the region prompted American prospectors to soon invade the region, and the government began to force the Sioux to give up their claims to the land.
The warriors, including Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, led the resistance against land grabs, but by 1877 the US government officially confiscated the land. Since then, the Sioux and other Native American activists have protested the US government’s claim to their ancestral lands.
The Amerindian protests of the 1970s
On August 29, 1970, a group of Native Americans, led by the San Francisco-based United Native Americans, climbed 3000 feet to the top of Mount Rushmore and set up a camp to protest the broken Treaty of Fort Laramie. The following year, on June 6, 1971, a group of Native Americans, led by the American Indian Movement (AIM), occupied sculpted Mount Rushmore to demand that the Treaty of 1868 be honored. Twenty Native Americans – nine men and 11 women – were ultimately arrested and charged with climbing the monument.
Marcella Gilbert, a community organizer from Lakota and Dakota, remembers watching television coverage of her mother, AIM leader Madonna Thunderhawk, occupying Mount Rushmore in 1970. The following year, at the age of 12-year-old Gilbert participated in the next occupation. She remembers the event as being “cool”, but also a little tense. On a “let’s go” order, she ran with others to the top of the site.
She recalls that the adults taking part in the occupation finally noticed the police and National Park Service rangers gathering below. It was decided to bring the younger members, including Gilbert, back to the mountain before the police arrived.
When an adult returned to the mountain with the children, Gilbert recalls watching from hidden spots as federal agents raided their camp. “We were in the trees,” says Gilbert. “I remember they tore up our tents, like they did in Standing Rock. Take all the food, break into the shed.
In 1980, the United States Supreme Court awarded the Great Sioux Nation $ 105 million in compensation for the loss of the Black Hills, a sum which was rejected by the Sioux Nation. Instead, the tribes have continued to demand the return of the land, and the money rejected remains in a government bank account.
The Presidents of Mount Rushmore and Their Conflicts with Native Americans
Indian Chief Oglala, Ben Black Elk, pictured in front of Mount Rushmore, c. 1962.
Smith / Gado / Getty Images Collection
Baker says most park staff are familiar with the traditional history of Mount Rushmore and the US Presidents it honors. This story includes how, in 1924, South Dakota state historian Doane Robinson commissioned sculptor John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum to carve a monument in the Black Hills. Borglum chose to sculpt George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln in Rushmore Peak. The National Park Service Mount Rushmore website cites the reason Borglum chose men, saying, “They represented the most significant events in US history.”
Baker says he encouraged his National Park Service staff to expand the history of Mount Rushmore to include the history of Native Americans. For example, the Mount Rushmore sculptor attributed the most important rock exhibit to the first President of the United States, George Washington. As Collin G. Calloway, professor at Dartmouth College, writes The Indian world of George Washington, Washington became known as the “Town Destroyer” among the Iroquois after 1779 when he called for “total destruction and devastation” of the Native American colonies in upstate New York.
Borglum chose to represent President Jefferson, lead author of the Declaration of Independence, for representing the growth of the United States. However, as James Rhonda writes in Thomas Jefferson and the changing West, Jefferson also laid the groundwork for an aggressive acquisition of Indian land.
When Theodore Roosevelt took office as the 26th President in 1901, he had already established a hostile relationship with Native Americans, saying in an 1886 speech: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the Indians. Indians dead. , but I believe nine out of ten are. ”
Borglum chose to commemorate Lincoln because, as he put it, Lincoln represented “the preservation of the United States.” While Lincoln led the preservation of the country during the American Civil War, he also signed an execution order to suspend 38 Dakota in Minnesota in what has become the largest mass execution in US history.
“All of these presidents have done something good for the country,” says Baker, but, he adds, they have also played a role in the oppression of Native American cultures by the US government.
