Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech showed why our battle over history is so fraught

President Trump marked the July 4 weekend by journeying to the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota, site of the 60-foot faces of four American presidents chiseled into some of the oldest exposed granite on Earth.

Looming over his visit, which included a military flyover and fireworks display, however, was the tie between the taking of the Black Hills — where Mount Rushmore is located — from the Great Sioux Nation and the Black Lives Matter protests across the country.

The Great Sioux Nation consider the Black Hills a place of refuge that provides food, water, shade and sites to perform sacred rites.

The hills belonged to the Sioux under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty that stated the territory consisting of what is today western South Dakota was “set apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of the Sioux Nation.

Following national furor over Custer’s defeat, Congress in 1877 unilaterally removed the Black Hills from the boundaries of the Fort Laramie Treaty.

Peter Norbeck of South Dakota that the handiwork of one sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, would “‘sell’ the Black Hills and [Custer State] Park as nothing else could.”.

To many Americans — including Trump — Mount Rushmore embodies America’s founding creed: “justice, equality, liberty, and prosperity.” The trip to Mount Rushmore is a near religious experience for some.

But this idea of Mount Rushmore as a goosebump-inducing holy site to these liberal and patriotic ideals ignores that the land was stolen from the Sioux Nation — turning the site into a “landscape of denial” in the words of sociologist James Loewen.

In the Court’s opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun described the United States’ procurement of the Black Hills as unconscionable, stating it “a more ripe and rank case of dishonest dealings [that] may never be found in our history.” The court granted the Sioux Nation $105 million for the Black Hills and $40 million for lands taken east of the hills with retroactive interest.

Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) introduced a bill in the Senate Indian Affairs Committee that called for 1.3 million acres of the Black Hills to return to jurisdiction under a Sioux National Council, while allowing for Mount Rushmore to remain under the authority of the National Park Service (the Sioux Council, however, would operate and profit from concession sales).

Mount Rushmore is, as one author put it, a Rorschach test for this interpretation: Does it represent American liberty, democracy and justice.

Members of the Sioux Nation like Frazier continue to fight for the return of their stolen land, as they have since 1877