Sad Indigenous History Fact
In honor of the Ecuadorian resistance getting a peace treaty and Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I decided to make two posts about native history facts, one fun fact, and one very unfun fact. The Sad Fact:
Many people don’t know the history behind Mount Rushmore, or that it is a desecrated holy site equivalent to the Mecca or Vatican City in the native religion.
It’s true name is Six Grandfathers, and it was a holy site to the Lakota people. It was the destination of a yearly ritualistic pilgrimage by their religious leader, and in the Treaty of Fort Laramie, the mountains were agreed to be given to the Native peoples(keep in mind this was less than 2 decades after the Trail of Tears, the ethnic cleansing that forced many natives to abandon their homeland and religious sites on it).
However, the United States shortly after invaded and conquered the territory, and despite the Lakota telling them the mountains were sacred, they decided to carve a monument to the four leaders of the colonial power that the United States was, and defaced and carved the mountain with dynamite, and destroyed evidence that the mountain was a holy site.
Today, it’s considered by many a “Shrine of Democracy”, and has 2 million tourists per year, most who know nothing of it’s colonial origins, a twisted echo of it’s original significance as a holy site to natives and image of what America truly is.
Here is Six Grandfathers before it was defaced:
There was a movement to sculpt a statue of Crazy Horse, a famous Lakota warrior who lead the resistance against the colonizers, into the mountains as a “memorial”, but it was done by a Polish-American while many native Lakota people objected and considered it a pollution on their sacred site, with the additional fact that Crazy Horse was notorious in never wanting to be photographed while alive, and was buried in an undisclosed location. It’s an important example on why Colonialism still effects Indigenous peoples today, and why having them as leaders of projects of tribute and cultural significance is important.
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