The Lakota, Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Memorials::

Mount Rushmore and Sacred Space

In 1924, sculptor Gutzon Borglum surveyed a granite uplift in the Black Hills and said, "There's the place to carve a great national memorial. American history shall march along that skyline". A testament to democracy and the United States, the Memorial was dedicated in 1927 and completed in 1942. Today some 2.5 million visitors flock to see the carved heads of four American presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Tourists who come to look upon the 6,000 feet 'Shrine to Democracy', learn that the men were chosen because they were seen to represent the birth, growth, preservation and development of the US and that the Shrine celebrates America's ideals of freedom and democracy. Visitors are treated to a special "lighting ceremony" each summer night that floods the sculpture with light to a soaring rendition of the Star-spangled Banner. The visitor's center adds to the excitement by showcasing each president's achievements and contextualising them within a chronology of US history that sheds little light on the Sioux.

Many Lakota I spoke with during fieldwork in South Dakota between 1998 and 1999 viewed the Memorial through different eyes. The Lakota Student Alliance, an organisation based on the Pine Ridge Reservation, seeks to reverse this trend of invisibility. Their harshly-worded statement, drafted in December 1997, presents an alternative view of the Memorial, which they call the 'Shrine of Hypocrisy':

"Mt. Rushmore is a desecration of our Sacred Mother Earth and a slap in the face of Lakota peoples everywhere. Documents have stated that Mt. Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota is a shrine to democracy. […] America was founded on the blood and lives of Indian peoples. We question what type of democracy this shrine represents. The four faces carved on stolen Indian lands supposedly represent the four most notable presidents of the United States. With their ideals and values defined through the study of Iroquois society, America's founding fathers are indebted to the Lakota and all Indian peoples for their mere existence. […] The founding fathers on that rock shared common characteristics. All four valued white supremacy and promoted the extirpation of Indian society. […] [A]t one time of another, all four provided for genocide against Indian peoples of this hemisphere" (1997).

The statement then goes on to list a variety of "anti-Indian" and "genocidal" acts each president committed, such as Washington's instruction to attack Iroquois Country and lay the settlements to waste in 1779; Jefferson's instruction to the War Department in 1807 that all Indian resistance be met with the hatchet; the hanging of thirty-eight Santee Dakota in Minnesota for the crime of defending their land, at the order of Lincoln in 1862; and Roosevelt's assertion that though he wouldn't go as far as stating that all good Indians were dead Indians, he would say that nine out of ten of them were. The Lakota Student Alliance accuse the four presidents of "eugenics" - that they "exterminated" Indian people because they believed them to be "an inferior race of people".

Other Lakotas expressed their antipathy towards the Memorial, though not all in such strong language as the Student Alliance. Most of the comments centered around two themes: nobody has the right to carve into the Black Hills, least of all the US government; and the Memorial does not reflect Indian history and thus has no meaning to Indians. I visited the Memorial several times during fieldwork, and rarely saw an Indian face in the crowd. One visit coincided with the grand opening of a new visitor's center and Avenue of Flags: only a few of the hundreds of visitors were Indian.

The news that Republican senators are talking about adding the face of former US President, Ronald Reagan, to the mountain, received a mixture of outrage and hilarity from the Lakota tribes. The news led the Hunkpapa Lakota editor of the Indian Country Today newspaper to exclaim: "To suggest that Ronald Reagan's face be carved on the mountain is one of the worst suggestions we ever heard. Reagan did more to set the clock back on Indian progress than any other president since Andrew Jackson" (Indian Country Today 1998).

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