Since Lakota Lives Matter Too, Trump’s Visit To Mount Rushmore Couldn’t Come At A Worse Time DMT.NEWS - DMT NEWS

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Since Lakota Lives Matter Too, Trump’s Visit To Mount Rushmore Couldn’t Come At A Worse Time DMT.NEWS

Article by WN.Com Correspondent Dallas Darling

A major reconsideration of how the history of colonization, conquest, slavery, and white supremacy is taught and viewed, especially through monuments, is now underway. Though this review was triggered by the social unrest and a tense reexamination of race relations that has raged since a video emerged of George Floyd (a Black man) pinned to the ground and dying under the knee of a white police officer, it had already been building up among American Indians for many years.

Long before the white men came and the great “White Father in Washington” ruled over America, Mount Rushmore was known as the Mountain of Six Grandfathers by the Lakota and other tribes. Along with being a sacred place of worship and ceremonies that included stories of creation, it was a sacred world used for contacting the spirit world and obtaining spiritual power. Many Lakota conducted the Vision Quest and Sun Dance there and gathered sacred medicines for healing.

When the Lakota and other American Indians see the four European American faces on Mount Rushmore, they see a treaty that promised them the Black Hills forever in exchange for all the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana. But after a series of broken promises and years of conquest and genocide, they see four white men carved on the mountain declaring: We are the conquerors, and Lakota lives do not matter. Neither were they allowed to breathe-even in their own land.

Germs, Guns, and Steal

The Lakota warn that President Donald Trump’s visit to Mount Rushmore to kick off Independence Day cannot come at a worse time. Along with the monument being a reminder of a hate crime-the desecration of native land violently stolen and used to pay homage to leaders hostile to American Indians, the Lakota continue to suffer disproportionately from waves of novel diseases, the first measles and the smallpox pandemics of 1492 which killed millions, and the last COVID-19.

The Lakota who live on remote tribal lands are dying of COVID-19 at rates 19 times that of all other populations combined. It is bound to get worse as Governor Kristi Noem, an ardent supporter of President Trump, threatens to sue and send troops to stop them from preventing entry to their lands to minimize the virus’s spread. Together, their actions constitute a legacy of colonialism, racism, and hatred that has imposed specific structures of inequality designed to undermine their livelihood.

Like other American Indians, the Lakota are accustomed to racism since people who put up markers and monuments are usually pillars of the white community.

Mount Rushmore, a symbol of white supremacy and domination, is no different.

The Lakota are barely mentioned in the museum which exhibits the story of the creation of Mount Rushmore and Gutzon Borglum, a member of the Ku Klux Klan. There also is the film “Shrine,” which glorifies the four presidents that were picked.

The museum never mentions how George Washington massacred Iroquois villages, including women and children. That Thomas Jefferson viewed Indians as subjects of “intellectual curiosity” and “political enemies” while pushing for expansionism, igniting the Creek War; or that his oft cited passage about slavery in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence was directed solely at Britain but not at the thirteen colonies. In America, he supported slavery rather than abhorred it.

Abraham Lincoln ordered the largest mass execution in U.S. history, hanging 38 Dakota-Indians. Theodore Roosevelt said:

“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are.”

As visitors extol the virtues of the faces on Mount Rushmore and think about who and what made America, Lakota see the faces of the men who lied, cheated, and murdered innocent people whose crime was living on the land they wanted to steal.

Re-Imaging Mount Rushmore-And America

The Lakota always have refused to recognize U.S. ownership of the Mountain of Six Grandfathers. Since the American Indian Movement in 1970, they have tried to take back what is rightfully theirs by occupying the ancestral home. Authorities have escalated the situation resulting in more violence. In 1979, the U.S. Court of Claims found that the Lakota were entitled to $17.1 million in compensation due to the federal government’s seizure of the Black Hills. They refused to take the money.

Later the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had violated the Fifth Amendment and the tribes were entitled to compensation. The tribes declined the compensation because it would legally end their demand for the Black Hills to be returned to them. In addition to claiming their sacred lands can never be bought or sold, they believe that recognizing and removing symbols to a racist past is an important step to a more just future that does not repeat the same mistakes.

Since the Mountain of Six Grandfathers had been promised (forever) to the Sioux in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, Harold Frazier, a tribal leader, and many others have called for the faces to be removed, perhaps even reimaged.

“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,” Frazier said.

He and others went on to criticize the president’s trip, “We are now being forced to witness the lashing of our land with pomp, arrogance and fire hoping our sacred lands survive. This brand on our flesh needs to be removed.” They also noted that in President Trump’s first year of the presidency, hate crimes against Native Americans increased 63 percent, from 154 incidents in 2016 to 251 incidents in 2017. What is more, each successive year hate crimes have risen.

Most disturbing is the “anti-Indian” groups that operate with no scrutiny and are not counted as hate groups. Some go as far as suggesting that the Trump Administration’s botched response toward American Indians regarding COVID-19 was white supremacy at work. Tribal groups have become so concerned that they are calling for an urgent need to change federal Indian policies that threaten the individual rights of all citizens living on or near Indian reservations.

Protests Versus Pomp

Governor Noem accuses Frazier and other Lakota of being extremists and using inflammatory language. She also pledged that as governor, Mount Rushmore would never change, nor would it ever be returned to the Lakota. “George Washington unified our nation. Thomas Jefferson wrote “All men are created equal.” Abraham Lincoln ended slavery. Teddy Roosevelt was the first President to dine with a Black man at the White House,” she said.

The Republican governor rejects the criticism by Lakota leaders as well that President Trump has disrespected native communities, blocked critical pandemic relief, tried to limit their voting rights (The new Voter ID laws, for instance, have suppressed many Lakota voters because the state and counties neglected to assign residential addresses for American Indian residents.), or is glorifying white supremacy at a site that was once sacred to tribal communities.

American Indian activists are planning protests for the president’s visit, hailed as his “comeback” campaign for a nation reeling from sickness, unemployment, and social unrest.

Along with a racist presidency, most agree that the visit is a safety concern not just for American Indians inside the reservation, but for people in the Great Plains. “We have such limited resources in the Black Hills,” said Oglala Sioux president Julian Bear Runner, “and we’re already seeing infections rising."

The Answer for Racial Justice

As Americans grapple with a landscape of white supremacy, historians agree that most white-inspired statues are not history but instead symbols. Neither were they put up as a fair or accurate representation of their time or surroundings, specifically as they relate to Native Americans and Blacks. Could the reassessment of motives and processes by which statues and monuments were erected go a long way to ensure fairer representation and a precursor to overdue structural reform? The answer, consequently, may be found in the Mountain of Six Great Grandfathers.

Dallas Darling (darling@wn.com)

(Dallas Darling is the author of Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John’s Apocalyptic Vision, and The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace. He is a correspondent for www.WN.com. You can read more of Dallas’ writings at www.beverlydarling.com and www.WN.com/dallasdarling.)



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