Native tribal leaders are calling for the removal of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, saying that it is carved in an area that is considered sacred land to Natives.
“Nothing stands as a greater reminder to the Great Sioux Nation of a country that cannot keep a promise of the treaty then the faces carved into our sacred land on what the United States calls Mount Rushmore,” Harold Frazier said, chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, where the memorial is located.point 403 | 1
On June 29, Frazier wrote in a statement:
“The United States of America wishes for all of us to be citizens and a family of their republic yet when they get bored of looking at those faces we are left looking at our molesters.”
“We are now being forced to witness the lashing of our land with pomp, arrogance, and fire, hoping our sacred lands survive,” Frazier said. “This brand on our flesh needs to be removed, and I am willing to do it free of charge to the United States, by myself if I must.”
Frazier is just the latest in a slew of Native leaders who have spoken out the monument, which features the faces of four former US presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.
In June, Oglala Sioux President Julian Bear Runner said Mt. Rushmore is a “great sign of disrespect,” noting he believes it should be “removed.”
Both the Cheyenne River Sioux and the Oglala Tribe — which is home to four bands of Sioux Natives — are part of the Great Sioux Nation.
According to the US National Archives. Mt. Rushmore is carved into the Black Hills, which had been occupied by Lakota Sioux Natives. In the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, signed amidst ongoing conflicts between Natives and Western expansion settlers, the US recognized the Black Hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation.
However, when gold was discovered in the Black Hills, it all changed.point 184 | Miners moved into the area, and the US Army began to move against the Native people in the mid to late 1870s.point 272 |
In 1876, the Great Sioux War was fought between the US and local Natives over ownership of the Black Hills.point 88 | The US confiscated the Hills through the “Sell or Starve” Act in 1877, which cut off rations to the Sioux people if they did not relinquish the land.point 222 | 1
About 50 years later, Mt. Rushmore was carved in the 1920s. According to the National Park Service, more than two million tourists visit annually.
US President Donald Trump along with first lady Melania Trump will go to Mt. Rushmore on Friday for an early Fourth of July fireworks celebration and flyover, the first of its kind in more than ten years.