In 1970, Indians led by United Native Americans (UNA) organizers occupied South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore National Memorial for more than a week and asserted the right of the Lakota (a Sioux tribe) to reclaim the Black Hills. On August 29, the 38th anniversary of the occupation’s onset, a small group of Lakota peacefully gathered at the memorial’s amphitheater to share cultural experiences and commemorate the historic event.
The historical roots of Native American displeasure with Black Hills developments like the Mount Rushmore National Memorial run very deep. The Black Hills of southwestern South Dakota were sacred to the Lakota and other plains Indians long before rapid economic exploitation of this landscape got underway with the gold rush of the 1870s.
It is highly germane that this incursion was illegal, and that Indians were wantonly killed or driven from land that had been treaty-promised to them in perpetuity. The Indian viewpoint is now, and for over a century has been, that the Black Hills were stolen and should be returned to the Lakota. (The UNA website link provided above portrays this viewpoint quite stridently.)
In the 1960s and 1970s, some Native American groups became quite confrontational as they asserted perceived rights to reclaim lands taken long ago by chicanery or outright theft that was condoned (if not sanctioned) by the state and federal governments. Primarily to get media attention and perhaps sway public opinion to their side, Indian groups held demonstrations at various state- and federally-owned sites. Some sites, including a few national parks or parks-to-be, were even occupied for a time. Among these were Alcatraz Island (occupied for 18 months in 1969-1970 and now part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area) and the Mount Rushmore Memorial (occupied for 10 days in 1978).
Many of us older folks have vivid memories of the American Indian Movement (AIM), which was responsible for the 1972 seizure of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, DC, and 1973’s 71-day standoff at Wounded Knee, a historically-significant town on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. This latter incident, a particularly ugly one, led to some shootings and several deaths.
Native Americans and Native Hawaiians have recently begun to reassert more often and more vigorously their tribal or ethnic claims to various national park lands as well as their desire for more respectful treatment of their cultural history in park exhibits, programs, and other features (including park names). Regular readers of Traveler will recall that we’ve recently reported on native people issues at Badlands National Park, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, Haleakala National Park, and Puuhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park.
Lakota culture is already on display at Mount Rushmore five days a week at Heritage Village, a cluster of three tipis off the Presidential Trail walkway. Native Americans work there as cultural interpreters, practicing traditional arts and answering questions about Indian history and culture. community. The park's superintendent (himself a Native American) has taken some heat from critics who believe that the Indian exhibit at Mount Rushmore is inappropriate and provocative.
Event anniversaries of special significance offer tribes or Indian organizations opportunities to gather at meaningful places to share cultural experiences, express solidarity, and draw public attention to their continuing claims for land restoration and more respectful treatment. This past Friday, August 29, was just such an occasion.
On that date, a United Native Americans-sponsored contingent staged a small, brief, and peaceful gathering in the amphitheater at Mount Rushmore to commemorate the UNA occupation of the memorial in 1970. Exercising his First Amendment rights, Quanah Parker Brightman, whose father Lehman Brightman (a Lakota) organized the occupation in 1970, had obtained a permit for the event. The gathering drew about 30 Indians, lasted four hours, and featured some speeches, ceremonies, and special musical performances.
Lehman Brightman himself was among the speakers. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with his Vietnam-era rhetoric, this is a man who, while a Ph.D. student at Berkeley in 1970, had this to say to a Time magazine reporter:
"It's time that Indians got off their goddam asses and stopped letting white people lead them around by their noses…….Even the name Indian is not ours. It was given to us by some dumb honky who got lost and thought he'd landed in India."
Get the picture?
Acting Chief Ranger Mark Gorman reported that the UNA-sponsored event at Mount Rushmore did not disrupt park operations or interfere with normal visitor activities.
As far as the Lakota and their supporters are concerned, whether this gathering and similar events will have a long term impact on Mount Rushmore’s management – and perhaps its ownership? – remains very much an open question. Should it be?
Comments
Anonymous;
Thank you. Nothing I could say would more-clearly & convincingly expose the core problem we face ... it's not the Indians, it's ourselves.
The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, ANCSA, offers a useful model for moving beyond the 19[sup]th[/sup] C. removal-oriented policies that still influence our stance with Native-issues across much of the conterminous States.
ANCSA is of course far from perfect, but points in a direction that leads away from an engrained confrontation with & marginalization of (the remnants of) Native groups.
It hasn't made the news much yet, but the energy industry and the U.S. government are gearing up for a new mining boom in the Black Hills, this time for not for gold but instead for uranium. Defenders of the Black Hills is trying to get the word out to people: http://www.defendblackhills.org/.
Hello: This is the only comment on this board that I totally agree with. We cannot change what happened in the past; we can only go on from today. There has to be some means of accommodation that shows respect for the Lakota sacred gounds as well as share the beauty of the land. I know that I would support such action. Thanks again for your comment.
Keep in mind, this park is not the only one with this type of problem.
Frank C, you do bring up interesting points but off the topic a bit...wasn't the "Trail of Tears" a form of slow genocide? In my opinion it was!
It certainly was (is) a form of genocide. Frank, by your definition, the Holocaust wasn't genocide because only 2/3 of all Jews in Europe were killed (and an equal proportion of Roma). In North America, over several hundred years, native populations were wiped out by the most conservative estimates by 85% of people and by the least conservative by as much as 98% from pre-Colombian totals. And, yes, it was often the policy if not to wipe out the entire population to wipe out their entire way of life.
Genocide has a couple of definitions that have generally been accepted - one by the UN and one by the man who coined the term Raphael Lemkin. By both definitions, what has happened to indigenous peoples in North America constitutes genocide.
No two genocides are alike, but you don't discount the term by noting what's different about different types and setting the one to the exclusion of the other.
Not that many years ago, I gave a Columbus Day presentation in Washington, DC, on this issue as it related to the war in Iraq. You can still download the slide presentation by clicking on this link (pdf).
Jim Macdonald
The Magic of Yellowstone
Yellowstone Newspaper
Jim's Eclectic World
Disease v. genocide is a false distinction for a lot of reasons; I'd argue that disease is actually an argument for genocide, not against it. And, I'm not talking about smallpox blankets, which was certainly a minor part of it. I'd argue that disease was something that Euroamericans understood was happening, understood why, and not only did nothing to stop it but actually celebrated when entire areas were wiped out - calling it a gift from God. Disease was considered a happy part of the process of genocide - to that extent, it was intentional and part of the process.
Smallpox could have been stopped and minimized. Settlement could have been stopped knowing the consequences of disease, but it wasn't. In fact, it was celebrated as a divine gift. It is not distinct from genocide; it was part of the process. Whether by direct annihilation or forced assimilation, indigenous culture was believed to be inferior, land grabs were justified because of this distinction (in fact, John Locke's famous book, which justifies property rights, uses indigenous people as a critical example of misuse of land), and so genocide was justified. That disease was such a big part of it doesn't change that it was genocide.
Jim Macdonald
The Magic of Yellowstone
Yellowstone Newspaper
Jim's Eclectic World
Frank, we will have to agree to disagree for now - because I think there is plenty of evidence to suggest that everything that happened does meet the accepted definition(s) of the word. Ward Churchill may otherwise be unpopular, but the case he makes in the long essay in his work A Little Matter of Genocide is very convincing, and you'll find that for all of Churchill's needless hyperbole, he makes a very scholarly case connecting what happened throughout history to the accepted definitions of the term genocide.
I don't give much credit to historians, who think by virtue of being historians, that they are therefore justified in making moral judgments about what actually happened for better or for worse. The same historians excuse slave owning founding fathers and say we need to make moral judgments based on the times and cut people some slack. We don't need to be historians to see the history and apply it to the definition; we certainly don't need to be historians to see what happened and to see that it was wrong on every level - whatever word we happen to give it. I would like to say on point 3 that it's pernicious to treat the Holocaust as the protype genocide of which nothing else could compare. There are some who would argue that the Holocaust is the only genocide that there was and has ever been, which would make the word "genocide" a completely useless word. Of course, there are horrors of the Holocaust that are unique in history and have never been repeated, but that's not what genocide means.
As for the rest of what you said, genocide aside, I agree wholeheartedly that the United States has no business with the Black Hills, but as those who really know me know, I don't believe the United States has any business being anywhere. I guess that I haven't been thrown in prison for saying that - perhaps because I still pay my taxes - suggests that there is some measure of hope. But, if you read accounts of what happened in the Twin Cities and in Denver during the two conventions, you'll wonder how far we are removed from all dissent being squashed in this country. We all in some sense have no business being where we are; I guess the question is what we can do now. Even when it comes to the Lakota, it's complicated because there is a divide between the traditionalists and the tribal government. So, instead of working within the stark borders that people set up, we need to figure out instead how to build community from the ground up. Perhaps, that simple and seemingly harmless kind of radicalism that I advocate is one reason my harsher words about this country (and the holy NPS included) are allowed to be safely ignored. Without community, we have no power.
Jim Macdonald
The Magic of Yellowstone
Yellowstone Newspaper
Jim's Eclectic World