For example, the Mount Rushmore sculptor allotted the most prominent rock display to the first president of the United States, George Washington. The National Park Service Mount Rushmore website cites Borglum’s reason for choosing the men, stating, “They represented the most important events in the history of the United States.”īaker says he encouraged his National Park Service staff to expand the story of Mount Rushmore to include the history of American Indians. Borglum chose to carve George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln into Rushmore Peak. This history includes how, in 1924, South Dakota State Historian Doane Robinson asked sculptor John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum to carve a monument in the Black Hills. Mount Rushmore Presidents and Their Conflicts With Native Americansīaker says most park employees are well-versed in the traditional story of Mount Rushmore-and the U.S. The tribes instead continued to demand the return of the land, and the rejected money remains in a government bank account. Supreme Court awarded the Great Sioux Nation $105 million as compensation for their loss of the Black Hills, a sum that was rejected by the Sioux Nation. Taking all the food, breaking into the shed.” “I remember them tearing through our tents, just like they did at Standing Rock. When an adult returned down the mountain with the children, Gilbert recalls watching from hidden locations as federal agents raided their camp. A decision was made to take the younger members, including Gilbert, back down the mountain before the police arrived. She recalls that adults taking part in the occupation eventually noticed police and National Park Service rangers gathering below. Upon a “let’s go” order, she ran with others to the top of the site. She remembers the event as being “cool,” but also a little tense. The following year, at age 12, Gilbert participated in the next occupation. Marcella Gilbert, a Lakota and Dakota community organizer, recalled watching televised coverage of her mother, AIM leader, Madonna Thunderhawk, occupying Mount Rushmore in 1970. Twenty Native Americans-nine men and 11 women-were eventually arrested and charged with climbing the monument. The following year, on June 6, 1971, a group of Native Americans, led by the American Indian Movement (AIM), occupied the carved Mount Rushmore to demand the 1868 treaty be honored. On August 29, 1970, a group of Native Americans, led by the San Francisco-based United Native Americans, ascended 3,000 feet to the top of Mount Rushmore and set up camp to protest the broken Treaty of Fort Laramie. The Last of the Sioux American Indian Protests of 1970s government's claim to their ancestral lands. Ever since, the Sioux and other American Indian activists have protested the U.S. government had officially confiscated the land. Warriors, including Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse led resistance against the land seizures, but, by 1877, the U.S. prospectors to soon overrun the area, and the government began forcing the Sioux to give up their claims on the land. But the discovery of gold in the region prompted U.S. The Black Hills were reserved for the Lakota (also known as the Teton Sioux) in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. Tribes such as the Shoshone, Salish, Kootenai Crow, Mandan, Arikara, and the Lakota have long lived around the Black Hills, a sanctuary the Lakota call “The Heart of Everything That Is.” Indigenous people knew the land centuries before white people had ever seen it, says Gerard Baker, a Mandan-Hidatsa Indian who served as Superintendent at Mount Rushmore National Memorial from 2004 to 2010. Sherman and the Sioux in a tent in Fort Laramie, 1868. The signing of a treaty between William T.
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