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
Sorry for putting it so bluntly, but anyone who thinks American Indians didn't suffer from genocide is ignorant or lying. I can't even imaging that anyone in this day and age can believe such nonsense.
That one poster has so infuriated me, I find myself incapable of reasonably discussing the topic at hand. I will have to return later to do so.
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My travels through the National Park System: americaincontext.com
After coming back a few days later to read the other comments and opinions posted, I find it so tiresome that there is an academic argument taking place about semantics, and although it is important to prove points, I think it is beneficial to stretch beyond academia (and I am an academic) in order to find a new way of thinking about an issue. I do appreciate that people are commenting- this is a discussion that is quite overdue. People cannot be expected to agree on the subtleties of language and its uses and abuses, but it seems perhaps that this is a distraction. The fact is, word it how you must, that the US government and the european peoples who settled here early on, made some serious and grave errors in judgment and action that have caused great harm to all concerned, including the settler's descendents! What can the US do in the present that will show respect and an attempt at amends to the Native Americans for this? I believe Ted mentioned ANSCA. I would like to hear what Native American organizations think would be helpful in amending the harm done.
Whether or not one chooses the word genocide to describe the actions of the European settlers, traders, politicians, Indian Agents, etc. is a moot point. The evidence contained in a multitude of historical records is fairly clear regarding the knowing behavior of certain groups who sought to gain an advantage in the American continent. Smallpox was not a "minor" cause, albeit the intentional trading in disease-laden blankets, robes, etc. may have been responsible for a fraction of the deaths to Native peoples. Just by virtue of interaction between Europeans and Natives, the former of which had developed a demonstrated resistance to the virus after many long decades of exposure, the latent virus was, inadvertently or not, transmitted from white immigrants to the indigenous peoples who previous had no record of infestation, and thereby were as vulnerable to a massive, highly contagious outbreak as the current population in this country would be today. Genocide, if you prefer to confine the definition to an intent to eliminate a specific group of people, was accomplished quite effectively, with some tribes experiencing a death rate as high as 90%, based on the best information available as recorded by the Native people during the 17th-19th centuries. The artwork of the time clearly indicates the deaths of numerous people inflicted with the tell-tale "body rash" attributable to one of three sources; smallpox, measles and plague. Any one of these vectors would have been sufficient to devastate a population with little or no genetic resistance. But again, if you confine the definition to "intent", then need you look beyond the Trail of Tears, the Navaho Death March, Sand Creek, Wounded Knee (although the initiation of hostilities in that instance is debatable, pending the source), and other instances in Minnesota, Arizona, California, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, etc. etc. etc. to distinguish a pronounced pattern of systematic hostility driven solely by the desire to acquire valuable lands for mineral and timber exploitation, agricultural "development" and the ever popular political gains to be derived from an expansion of settlement?
On the issue of Washington and Jefferson, both make genocidal comments on indigenous tribes as well. Washington is often seen as less so because he chose to negotiate with tribes as sovereign nations rather than force war on them. However, for Washington, letters show this was a practical consideration more than anything bordering on respect for the tribes. Washington had promised all this land for the veterans of the Revolutionary War, but the problem was that this land was controlled by indigenous tribes. He had two choices - he could start another war or he could negotiate. He figured it would be far easier and less costly to negotiate, to take by treaty for far less blood than what could be taken by war.
•“For I repeat it, again, and I am clear in my opinion, that policy and economy point very strongly to the expediency of being upon good terms with the Indians, and the propriety of purchasing their Lands in preference to attempting to drive them by force of arms out of their Country; which as we have already experienced is like driving the Wild Beasts of the Forest which will return as soon as the pursuit is at an end and fall perhaps on those that are left there; when the gradual extension of our Settlements will as certainly cause the Savage as the Wolf to retire; both being beasts of prey tho’they differ in shape. In a word there is nothing to be obtained by an Indian War but the Soil they live on and this can be had by purchase at less expense, and without that bloodshed, and those distresses which helpless Women and Children are made partakers of in all kinds of disputes with them.”–George Washington, Letter to James Duane, September 7, 1783, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=359
Jefferson was extremely hostile toward indigenous people and said outright that he would annihilate every single Native American if they attack the United States and not succumb to treaty making:
•" ...if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe we will never lay it down tilthat tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi...in war they will kill some of us; But we will destroy all of -them. Adjuring them, therefore, if they wish to remain on the land which covers the bones of their fathers, to keep the peace with a people who ask their friendship without needing it, who wish to avoid war without fearing it. In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.”–Thomas Jefferson, “To the Secretary at War [Henry Dearborn],”August 28, 1807, http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/Vol10/0054-10_Pt06_...
And, as has been noted, Lincoln and T. Roosevelt were not any better.
It's not for any of us to say what the Lakota might do with Mt. Rushmore, but I cringe every time I have seen the monument. It must be the ultimate branding of the conquest of this country over the land that I can imagine. I guess it would be like putting a temple to James Polk in the Grand Canyon.
Jim Macdonald
The Magic of Yellowstone
Yellowstone Newspaper
Jim's Eclectic World
Good research Jim! We must not let bona fide historians distort or de-sanitize the rich cultural history of the great Lakota Nation...even if means using the word "genocide" to it's most appropriate means.
Jim Macdonald;
My kudos & thanks too, Jim, for your impressive research on the Indian-policies of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Most compelling.
Ted Clayton
Frank,
With all due respect, the fuller context of the quote does nothing to change the force of it. It's not particularly different than the saber rattling we see by any President who claims to want peace. Peace is always cheaper.
Is it that common when saber rattling to claim that all of a people should be annihilated who rise up in war?
If you want more for Jefferson, there are plenty of assimilationist quotes, which are no less egregious.
As for the so called consensus among historians, which there isn't on this question, the issue is whether it's appropriate for historians to be making moral judgments. When historians are doing nonsensical things like ranking American presidents and making moral defenses of historical actors, then they are no longer doing history. They are doing things that any person can do who can justify the moral principles to the historical record. This is an especially touchy subject for me because my own academic background is in both history and philosophy, and one thing that drove me from pursuing history further was the maddening tendency of many historians to engage in moralizing as though they were engaging in history.
Jim Macdonald
The Magic of Yellowstone
Yellowstone Newspaper
Jim's Eclectic World
The quotes below are from Frank C's original post:
The word "genocide" did indeed come into use during the 20th century, but that does not mean it cannot be used to describe actions prior to WWII.
Neither were the Jews, nor the gypsies, nor any of the other socio-ethnic groups targetted during the Holocaust and other, similar events. Saying that a particular race was not completely eliminated as a reason not to use the term genocide is lame at best.
Quite true, absolutely. The problem is only one of technology, however. The intent of American governments, both colonial and federal, was to drive away the natives and claim lands. They were only so successful because of lack of the means to make the job complete. The level of crimes that were perpetrated by Europeans on native populations were no less immoral simply because they didn't have the means.
It is far too late to lay blame on anyone. At this point in time, the past is simply series of facts to be decoded and understood. The problem is with the trivialization of horrendous events. Our nation has many, many blemishes, and to excuse them away with semantics is disingenuous
Laying aside the fact that some military commanders used smallpox as a weapon (in well-documented incidents), the very idea that a lopsided war eradicates a race of people is the very definition of genocide! Every genocide committed on the planet can be traced back to a lopsided war! This is true of the Nazis or the Hutus or the Khmer Rouge (in which case, it was intelligentsia who was targetted for elimination). Superior military forces systematically killing the weaker people -- the definition of genocide.
I suspect the historians you are mentioning are only looking at the Holocaust as the sole, representative incident of genocide. Or that they are unwilling to have any shadow tainting American history.
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My travels through the National Park System: americaincontext.com