I sit in front of my laptop on July 3, 2020, Facebook Live in full swing. I watch as cars zoom past the camera. Some drivers honk. Others hurl insults and rude gestures. My emotions are high despite watching from the safety of my home in Rapid City, South Dakota. I worry about my relatives, but I feel a deep sense of justice. I see the words “LAND BACK” splashed across banners, shawls, and paramilitary gear. I wait with anxious excitement and pride to see what the group of relatives does next; they illustrate our connection to this place through their activation.
The protest was a collective action led by Očéti Šakówiŋ activists to disrupt Donald Trump’s presidential rally at Mount Rushmore, held the day before the Fourth of July. The rally and highway blockage, of course, were escalated by aggressive police presence and eventually end in multiple arrests. By the end of it, the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office will have arrested 20 adults and one minor, mostly tribal citizens, including Ogala Lakota organizer Nick Tilsen. This is the energy I like to see: ongoing disruption of settler-colonial institutions and criticism directed at the monument.
The rally echoed similar demonstrations that occurred in the early 1970s, when relatives camped at the base of the monument, poured paint on the faces, and demanded the return of stewardship of the Black Hills to the Očéti Šakówiŋ (Lakota-, Dakota-, Nakota-speaking tribal communities). The call for land back has been consistent since the monument was authorized for construction on the face of Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, or Six Grandfathers, in March 1925, one year after the federal government forced American citizenship on tribal nations through the Citizenship Act of 1924 and around 50 years after the land was stolen from several nations grouped under the umbrella term of “the Sioux” in the treaty. Completed over 14 years, the monument was designed by sculptor Gutzon Borglum and named for the New York attorney who secured the land for the Harney Peak Tin Company. For a century, our deep-rooted connection to the Black Hills has been disrupted by this eyesore and those who flock ignorantly and actively to a place that we see as our relative, our grandfather and grandmother.
Charles D’Emery’s photo of Six Grandfathers in 1927, before the construction began on the carvings for Mount Rushmore. (image public domain via the Mount Rushmore National Historic Site – National Park Service, Dickinson State University, and Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library)
Any memorialization of the United States government on our land is a blight. We have been facing assimilation tactics for much longer, but this hundred-year period has seen the waxing and waning of resistance, paradigm-shifting rhetoric, and defiant direct action that evokes a sense of continuity and relentlessness.
When family or friends come to visit and ask to see Mount Rushmore, I begrudgingly tell them I will drive them by the entrance. A visit to the park almost feels like a rite of passage; here are four faces that represent oppression, violence, and the agility of tribal perseverance. If you have never been to the monument, visitors might fill your ear with fun facts — Thomas Jefferson’s vanilla ice cream recipe or the lighting system that illuminates the faces at night.
But on my most recent visit in 2022, I felt as though I were on the set of a horror movie, with patriotic zombies shuffling out of the pine trees. I always encourage my passengers to flip an obligatory bird toward the monument. I remind people that this is what we have survived: town-destroyer George Washington, enslaver Thomas Jefferson, racist Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, who ordered the hanging of the Dakota 38 + 2. As much as this ode to the institutions of settler colonial violence is designed to inflict terror upon me, it also fails — my rootedness in the Black Hills will always be a comfort that persists beyond erasure.
The author at Mount Rushmore in September 2020 (photo Clementine Bordeaux/Hyperallergic)
The monument is not without nuance and complexity. There are currently Očéti Šakówiŋ relatives who regularly perform at the site, hoop dancing and singing, during the peak of South Dakota tourism. Other relatives work for regional National Park Service sites and maintain relationships with Mount Rushmore to ensure that Indigenous narratives are included, even if only marginally. At the same time, the monument is haunted by politicians like the former South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, who currently holds a position of power — secretary of Homeland Security — that terrorizes our Black and Brown relatives across the nation while ridiculously hosting naturalization celebrations at the site.
If Mount Rushmore were destroyed and lost to memory, tribal people would continue unbothered by this blip in history. The Black Hills is our wizípaŋ, a vital repository that holds sites of relational significance. We pray here, we share stories, we build memories on the land. When passing Mount Rushmore, our eyes are trained to see the four awful faces of settler violence. But I still see the Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe and all the non-human relatives that will continue to exist in the region beyond white supremacy. Očéti Šakówiŋ people will continue to pass by the monument without or without celebration, and I imagine in another 100 years we’ll be asking, “Rushmore, who?”
