Removing Mount Rushmore? Ahead of Trump Visit, Sioux Leaders Say Yes

"We are now being forced to witness the lashing of our land with pomp, arrogance, and fire."
Image of Mount Rushmore against a deep blue sky with a forest of evergreen trees in front of it
Harold M. Lambert/Getty Images

Mount Rushmore has become the center of a major public discussion about problematic monuments, stolen Indigenous land, and the public reckoning with the United States’ racist past.

Across the country, statues honoring the confederacy and Christopher Columbus have been falling or removed (including a historical whipping post in Delaware). Meanwhile, many people have questioned (and joked about) Mount Rushmore's famous stone carvings of four U.S. presidents as a potential crowning achievement in the public effort to remove monuments many say misremember our history. Now, as tribal leaders call for the removal of Mount Rushmore, President Donald Trump is preparing to speak at the site for a July 3 event.

First, some history: As Smithsonian Magazine lays it out, the 60-foot carvings of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt were built as a tourist attraction for South Dakota and an attempt to embody the supposed greatness of the country. The monument was executed by artist Gutzon Borglum, who had previously worked on the confederate monument Stone Mountain in Georgia, the birthplace of the modern Ku Klux Klan. Some assert Borglum himself may have had ties to the KKK.

Uglier than the artist’s history is the history of the medium he worked with. As remembered for PBS, Mount Rushmore is carved in the Black Hills, an area sacred to the Lakota Sioux tribe, who had been guaranteed in an 1868 treaty that they would maintain control of the area until gold was found nearby in the 1870s. Fifty years later, men who symbolized a country that committed genocides of native peoples were carved into the stolen, sacred mountains.

Modern-day tribal leaders are now calling for the monument’s removal ahead of Trump’s visit. As the Sioux Falls Argus Leader reported on June 25, Oglala Sioux President Julian Bear Runner expressed support for Mount Rushmore to be “removed but now blown up.”

“I don’t believe it should be blown up, because it would cause more damage to the land,” he said. But he also expressed what the monument means now, nearly 100 years after Borglum began carving it: “To me, it’s a great sign of disrespect.” 

The Argus Leader reported on June 30 that another Sioux leader had joined calls to remove Mount Rushmore. Harold Frazier, chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, said, "Nothing stands as a greater reminder to the Great Sioux Nation of a country that cannot keep a promise or treaty than the faces carved into our sacred land on what the United States calls Mount Rushmore."

"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."

President Bear Runner also said last week that the president has not consulted with tribal leaders ahead of his visit to unceded Sioux territory, where he and South Dakota’s Republican governor Kristie Noem are planning to hold a non-socially distant gathering of thousands. They’re attempting to revive an Independence Day tradition of fireworks at Mount Rushmore, but weather conditions mean a team of local agencies is on call to make a day-of determination about the forest fire risk associated with the president’s fireworks show.

Noem herself has said that a removal of Mount Rushmore would not happen “on [her] watch” (her current term runs to 2023). Trump has also been harshly critical of the removal of historical monuments. On June 26, he issued an executive order “protecting American monuments, memorials, and statues and combating recent criminal violence.”

“Over the last five weeks, there has been a sustained assault on the life and property of civilians, law enforcement officers, government property, and revered American monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial,” the executive order (EO) reads. “Many of the rioters, arsonists, and left-wing extremists who have carried out and supported these acts have explicitly identified themselves with ideologies — such as Marxism — that call for the destruction of the United States system of government. Anarchists and left-wing extremists have sought to advance a fringe ideology that paints the United States of America as fundamentally unjust and have sought to impose that ideology on Americans through violence and mob intimidation.”

The EO goes on to threaten prosecution to “the fullest extent of law” for people who “desecrate” or “deface” monuments, memorials, statues, or religious depictions; it does the same for rioters and vandals; and threatens withholding federal support for public spaces managed by state or local governments that have “failed to protect monuments, memorials, and statues.”

Furthermore, the EO offers six months of federal support for any jurisdiction attempt to protect monuments and lays out how Attorney General Bill Barr will “prioritize” the “investigation and prosecution” of vandals.

As Vice reported on July 1, Trump’s Barr-led Department of Justice is apparently already cracking down on Black Lives Matter protesters.

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