The Lakota Sioux Have Been In Court Battles Over the Ownership of Mt. Rushmore for Almost 100 Years
Forty years ago July 9, the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council rejected an award of $105 million from the U.S. Supreme Court. They had fought one of the longest court battles in the history of the United States—nearly 60 years—and they had won: The Court agreed that the Black Hills, including Mount Rushmore, had been stolen from them. But they didn’t, and don’t, want payment. They want their land back.
Indigenous Americans beat Europeans to the Black Hills of South Dakota by a few centuries. First the Arikara settled there, then the Cheyenne, Crow, Kiowa, Pawnee, and then the Lakota Sioux. The range became sacred to the Lakota and they named it Paha Sapa, “hills that are black.” One mountain in particular, The Six Grandfathers, was particularly sacred — Vatican-caliber sacred.
On the 3rd of July, 2020, several groups of Native American demonstrators received some press coverage for protesting Donald Trump’s “jamboree” at the Six Grandfathers (now called Mount Rushmore)—a campaign event analysts have called a highly calculated play in his reelection strategy against Biden, and at which the president gave a speech that a historians and fascism scholars called “the closest he’s come” to straight fascism.
On the 4th of July, someone asked me if I’d watched the speech and said to me: I guess the Lakota decided now is a good time to get all bent out of shape about [Mount Rushmore] again.
It was a funny thing to say, considering that while neither of us could then name the U.S. presidents whose faces are carved onto this famously patriotic tourist attraction off the top of our heads, the Sioux Tribe is in its 98th year of court battles over their rights to the Black Hills, and undoubtedly, they are pretty bent out of shape about it.
This isn’t new. But as The New Yorker wrote in 2016 on the eve of the Standing Rock conflict, when indigenous Americans gather to make a point, the nation tends not to pay attention.
Before Rushmore was even a glint in the South Dakota tourism board’s eye, for nearly a century and a half, in 19th-century battle after battle, in peace talks, in encampments and occupations, in the 1940s, ’50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, in marches and demonstrations (some widely covered by the media, many not), in hold-outs that have led to arrests and fatal shootings, and in a century of court cases, the Lakota Sioux have consistently made it clear: They are really quite bent out of shape about Mount Rushmore.
The 1870s: The Fight Over “Mount Rushmore” Started Long Before Mount Rushmore As We Know It
By the late 1860s, settlers of European descent and the United States federal government had forced most Native Americans onto “Indian reservations” or slaughtered them in mass genocide. But the Plains Indians held out — and it sort of worked: Sioux leaders negotiated with the U.S. government to recognize Sioux ownership of the region, and the government conceded, designating the Black Hills as “unceded Indian Territory” for the exclusive use of native peoples in perpetuity. This was the 1868 Treaty of Laramie.
The Black Hills were no great loss to the U.S., anyway: As of 1874, white Americans considered this small mountain range extruding from the Great Plains worthless, maybe good for agriculture, and not much else. At least, that was the case until gold was discovered. By the mid-1870s, the U.S. would send armies to displace the landowners in order to excavate more.
As gold diggers descended, thousands of Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho set up camp to resist being pushed off of the land they had just won by treaty. General Custer of Ohio was sent with a couple hundred men to persuade them to move onto reservations, and on June 25, 1876, Custer, despite being dramatically outnumbered, decided to attack their camp. The violence that ensued and the ineptitude of Custer’s operation became known as the Battle of the Little Bighorn or “[General] Custer’s Last Stand.”
The next year, Congress reneged on its promise under the treaty and vested ownership of the Black Hills to the U.S. government. Billions of dollars in gold were excavated.
The Sioux remained bent out of shape about this.
The 1920s: Mount Rushmore Was Commissioned Just After The Sioux Took Their Ownership Claim Of The Black Hills To Court
In 1922—the year the Association of American Indian Affairs was founded and at the dawn of the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act—the Sioux embarked on what would be a decades-long legal battle and lobbying effort to recover the land they had been granted by treaty. The court case was United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians.
Unrelated, in 1923, a South Dakota state historian proposed to create a massive monument in the Black Hills with the explicit purpose of attracting tourists. He originally proposed that it would include “great heroes of the West,” including Sacagawea (the Lemhi Shoshone woman who helped guide the Lewis and Clark Expedition) and Lakota Sioux leader Red Cloud, and that it could be carved into The Needles, a granite pillar geological formation south of the present-day Mount Rushmore in what is now Custer State Park.
A sculptor was brought on board.[1] As the Sioux’s legal battle over the Black Hills continued, the federal government under Calvin Coolidge got involved in the plan and it became instead a monument of U.S. presidents’ faces carved on one of the Lakota’s most spiritually significant mountains, Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe or “the Six Grandfathers,” later called “Mount Rushmore.”
Perhaps this was punitive; perhaps it was a coincidence.
Carving began, and predictably, the Lakota Sioux were very bent out of shape. The head of George Washington was unveiled in 1930. (The Mohawk and Cherokee remember him as a liar who ordered the slaughter of indigenous Americans and burned their villages.) The head of Thomas Jefferson (who, other than considering indigenous Americans to be “merciless savages” and supporting their displacement to reservations, wasn’t the worst, relatively speaking) was dedicated in 1936.
In 1937, the head of Abraham Lincoln, who ordered the hanging of 38 Sioux in the Dakota war of 1862, was dedicated.[2]
Theodore Roosevelt’s head was dedicated in July 1939, to the sculptor’s chagrin the federal government defunded the project before the completion of the torsos, and the tourist attraction was declared complete in 1941.
“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”
–Theodore Roosevelt
By the monument’s completion, workers had carved away 450,000 tons of granite from the Six Grandfathers in order to celebrate new American presidents.
From a transcript from Ken Burns’ PBS documentary on National Parks: “For many American Indians, the carvings on Mount Rushmore have come to epitomize the loss of their sacred lands and the injustices they’ve suffered under the US government.”
In other words, they can get pretty bent out of shape.
The 1940s–70s: Protests and Demonstrations
In 1948, 17 miles from Rushmore, Standing Bear commenced the creation of Crazy Horse Memorial. [3]
In the summer of 1970, as the Supreme Court case over the broken Laramie treaty waged on, members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupied Mount Rushmore, staging an encampment on the ledge above the presidents’ heads for nearly a month.[4]
In February of 1973, members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe joined leaders of the American Indian Movement to occupy Wounded Knee, South Dakota, part of AIM’s ongoing campaign to compel the government to honor the treaties it had made with Native American tribes.
This followed not only the occupation Mt. Rushmore three years prior but the 1969–1971 occupation of Alcatraz Island, which had been granted to the Sioux by the same violated 1868 treaty.[5]
The 1980s: United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians
The conclusion of the aforementioned 1922 court case, United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, came in 1980 — at least technically.[6]
The Court sided with the Sioux — the land had been wrongly taken by the U.S. government—and as recompense the Court granted an award of the land’s supposed value based on its 1922 value adjusted for inflation: around $105 million.[7]
But after six decades of litigation, it didn’t feel like a victory to the Sioux. The issue was, they never wanted money to begin with. They just wanted their damn land back.
Forty years ago this Thursday, July 9, 1980, the Sioux stakeholders in a unanimous decision refused to accept monetary award on the grounds that the Oglala Sioux Tribe was not represented at the Court proceedings. This was “despite the fact that the people of these tribes are now scattered on several reservations and are some of the poorest among any group in the country,” as the United Nations would later put it in a Human Rights Council special report.
The Court paid the lawyers (a cool $10 million) and placed the rest of the award in a trust which the tribal council refuses to claim to this day. As of 2011, the value of the trust was approximately $1.3 billion, according to PBS News Hour:
The tribes say the payment is invalid because the land was never for sale and accepting the funds would be tantamount to a sales transaction. Ross Swimmer, former special trustee for American Indians, said the trust fund remains untouched for one reason: “They didn’t want the money. They wanted the Black Hills.”
“The Sioux tribes have always maintained that that confiscation was illegal and the tribes must have some of their ancestral lands returned to them, and they’ve maintained that position since 1877,” said Mario Gonzalez, general counsel for the Oglala Sioux Tribe, who has devoted much of his career to the issue.
The following July, still trying to pursue their goal of land, Mario Gonzalez, a member of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation who would serve as the Oglala Sioux’s general counsel for decades, filed a lawsuit asking for 7.3 million acres of the territory along with $11 billion in damages. A billion would go to raising the standard of living and $10 billion would go toward the restoration of the land and the removal of “nonrenewable resources.”
The Court denied Gonzalez’s claim in a case that was escalated to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the denial was ultimately upheld (although the United Nations stepped in to investigate if this denial breached international law). But repeated appeals eventually led to the drafting of a Congressional bill that asked for the return of the 7.3 million acres including “all Federal land in the area, roughly two million acres,” with the promise that the Sioux would keep all federal workers on the Black Hills employed there.
The Sioux were denied again, on the basis of a technicality: that the Indian Claims Commission was the only mechanism Congress has authorized for hearing land cases of this type, and it had been terminated. The bill died in committee. Bills continued to be proposed throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, and they continued to die in committee.
The court-appointed rightful landowners were bent out of shape. In April of 1981, 40 Sioux built a camp in Yellow Camp, Black Hills to stake their claim. The United States Forest Service made them leave.
The 2000s: Still Bent Out Of Shape, But A Glimmer of Hope
In 2008, under the leadership of Mount Rushmore’s first indigenous superintendent Gerard Baker, the National Park Service opened Mount Rushmore National Memorial’s “Heritage Village” where Sioux interpreters were hired as seasonal rangers to educate visitors about Sioux culture and history and about their understanding of the Black Hills.[8]
Of the new program, Baker explained:
We have stories that are very hard to tell; we have stories that are very hard to listen to. Primarily the reactions have been very positive but there are always those few that condemn; they didn’t want to hear about the American Indian plight, or they don’t want to hear about the breaking of treaties. Because it happened a long time ago, it doesn’t affect us today. And I believe it still affects us today.[9]
For the first time, the landowners were permitted to share at least a sliver of the mountain’s more complete story with visitors.
In 2009, the Obama Administration expressed interest in settling the longstanding land claim dispute over the Black Hills, and signed a bill that paved the way through a litany of bureaucracy for Native American tribes to participate in policy decisions that affected their lives. The following year, the administration announced it would support the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples after voting against it in 2007, though to this day, the United States hasn’t ratified the convention dealing with indigenous rights.
The 2010s: The United Nations Human Rights Council Sides With The Sioux
In 2012, United Nations Special Rapporteur James Anaya of the Human Rights Council met with tribes in seven states and members of the Obama administration in order to complete a report from the UN Human Rights Council on the “situation of indigenous peoples in the United States of America.”[10]
In the report, he recommends that the U.S. Federal Govt. honor their treaties and return stolen lands to some tribes, including the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore to the Sioux.
He also mentions:
In addition to millions of acres of lands lost, often in violation of treaties, a history of inadequately controlled extractive and other activities within or near remaining indigenous lands, including nuclear weapons testing and uranium mining in the western United States, has resulted in widespread environmental harm, and has caused serious and continued health problems among Native Americans.[11]
The United States didn’t follow the recommendations of the U.N. In fact, some Trump supporters want to withdraw from the post-WWII international peace and security organization altogether.
2016–2020: So Why Are The Lakota Suddenly All Bent Out Of Shape Now, Of All Times? Do They Just Love Attention? Media Stunts. Fake News. Blah blah blah
This week, the Standing Rock Sioux won a battle in the years-long legal battle against the Keystone Pipeline. The Supreme Court refused to block and order to stop work until the impacts to the tribe are assessed.
Meanwhile, plans for a 10,600-acre uranium mine threaten their neighbors downstate: The Dewey-Burdock mine would usurp 8,500 gallons of groundwater per minute from the Inyan Kara aquifer. It could destroy burial grounds and permanently taint the residents’ water supply.
This means another costly legal battle to stop the mine’s construction, on the grounds that it violates federal environmental laws, and according to the IWGIA, “Policies consistent with diminishing tribal land rights, sovereignty, and input into land and resource issues have multiplied under the Trump administration.[12]
Just like carving Rushmore on the Six Grandfathers — Trump’s environmental policies and defiant refusal to acknowledge the long-standing land claim aside — the Independence Day event was insult to injury. No masks and no social distancing in the pandemic increased risk for locals, essential workers and Parks staff. And the president insisted upon a massive fireworks display, despite “higher than usual” risk of wildfires after an extremely dry summer. (“What can burn? It’s stone,” Trump said of the park.)
Carrying on a consistent legacy of protest that the land was stolen from them (not once but twice), Sioux and other indigenous demonstrators peacefully marched with signs and obstructed the entrance to the park with bodies and vehicles for three hours. Hehakaho Waste, a spiritual elder with the Oglala Sioux tribe told ABC News, “The president needs to open his eyes. We’re people, too, and it was our land first.”
The local police and National Guard was prepared to respond with riot gear, gas masks, pepper spray, and smoke shells. ABC reported that about 15 protesters were arrested obstructing traffic.
“Today has been a proud day to be Lakota,” Oglala Lakota Nation citizen Nick Tilsen told Complex of the Rushmore demonstration. “We put this place in lockdown for three hours and we did it in a good way. We got this power from our ancestors.”
Then the rally and fireworks proceeded.
Ironically, in Trump’s speech, he echoed the same sentiments, but with the weight of armed law enforcement, the National Guard, and a massive fireworks display behind him: “We will not be terrorized, we will not be demeaned, and we will not be intimidated by bad, evil people. It will not happen,” Trump said at the rally, adding, the American people “will not allow our country and all of its values, history and culture to be taken from them.”
Footnotes
[1] According to The New York Times, before he was recruited to create Mount Rushmore, Gutzon Borglum sculpted an enormous bas-relief of Confederate leaders in Georgia during which time he “formed strong bonds with leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and participated in their meetings, in part to secure funding” for the project. “He also espoused white supremacist and anti-Semitic ideas, according to excerpts from his letters included in Great White Fathers, a book by the writer John Taliaferro about the history of Mount Rushmore.”
[2] A bill was introduced that year proposing the addition of Susan B. Anthony. It failed.
[3] Crazy Horse Memorial was named after Crazy Horse, a Lakota Sioux commander who helped defeat Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn, only then to be killed in military custody the following year. Standing Bear said he ‘would like the white man to know that the red man had great heroes too.’ Korczak Ziolkowski, who was a sculptor’s assistant to the principal sculptor on Mount Rushmore, took on the project. However, he had cut ties with the federal government after they ceased funding Rushmore, and the entire Crazy Horse project was and continues to be funded by donation. It has been underway for 70 years and is still incomplete. While socioeconomic factors widely across the U.S., the poverty rate for the 2% of Americans who identify as American Indian or Alaska Native is around 27%, about twice to two-and-a-a-half times the national rate.
[4]“We’re sick and tired of sitting back and turning the other cheek, and then bending over and getting those other two kicked,” United Native Americans president Lehman Brightman said a televised interview at the time of the 1970 Rushmore occupation.
[5] This “Second Siege at Wounded Knee” followed, of course, the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The U.S. cavalry had arrested and killed Sitting Bull thinking he was someone else, which raised tensions, and two weeks later, U.S. armed forces carried out a “brutal massacre” in which hundreds of Sioux Lakota were murdered, nearly half of them women and children. The cavalry lost 25 men in the massacre. In the 1973 version, U.S. Marshals surrounded the occupiers, evoking the start of the 1890 massacre. Over the course of months, the FBI got involved, two Native Americans were killed and a marshal was injured, and according to PBS, violence continued for several years leading to more deaths.
[6] The Court recognized a tension between Congress’s duty to serve as a benevolent trustee for Indians, and the power to take their land, and ordered “just compensation to the Sioux Nation,” had been due to the plaintiffs since 1922 and that “that obligation, including an award of interest, must now, at last, be paid.”
[7] The Supreme Court deemed the Sioux were owed $17 million, the value of the hills in 1922 plus 5% interest each year, not accounting for the “billions of dollars worth of gold,” per The Washington Post, that had been extracted, and before the deduction of legal fees to lawyers for a 60-year court case.
[8] In 2004, Gerard Baker, who grew up on a reservation in North Dakota, was appointed the first indigenous superintendent of Mount Rushmore. He had served as superintendent at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, which he took over just following the park’s contentious name change from Custer Battlefield to Little Bighorn Battlefield. (We renamed things for these reasons even back in 2004.) He told Ken Burns and PBS: “It was very challenging to accept the job here, because growing up I understood what Mount Rushmore meant. And for us, for Indian people, it doesn’t mean ‘Success of America.’ It means the desecration of the sacred Black Hills; it means the losing of the Black Hills to the United States government, to white people that came in and shoved everybody out of here and put us on a reservation. So it meant a lot of negative things.”
[9] The reminiscence of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ testimony about the importance of U.S. reparations for slavery and Mitch McConnell’s counterpoint is uncanny.
[10] The report’s sheer existence spurred some hope. While it was underway, Dana Lone Hill, a journalist from the Pine Ridge reservation, wrote for The Guardian: “One of the most sacred areas of the Black Hills, Pe’ Sla, is under threat of turning into a saltwater taffy stand, or condos, or a golf course, or some other tourist trap — like the hundreds already spread through our sacred Black Hills. The state of South Dakota even has plans to put a road through the middle of this, one of our most sacred areas.” She hoped the United Nations could intervene to impress the importance of honoring treaties and protecting this land.
[11] I recently wrote about this in the context of fracking on the Navajo Nation’s Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness for The Nation
[12] The IWGIA explains, “In North Dakota, two lawmakers introduced a state bill calling on the federal government to allow states to solve economic problems on reservations. Since its early days, the administration has mulled over proposals to privatize Native lands, which would remove federal guidelines and tribal sovereignty that are seen as obstacles to development.” The Native lands most vulnerable to Trump’s privatization plans are rich in oil.
