Surveillance camera at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota, unceded Lakota Sioux territory. 2014.
I paid nine dollars for parking that day and immediately regretted it. They even had the audacity to tell me that it was a 365-day pass, AS IF that was a consolation and AS IF I needed to visit more than exactly once. I should have declined to pay. My retroactive excuse is that my praxis has holes and there was the pressure of a long line of cars behind me idling in July.
The so-called Mount Rushmore National Monument is located in the Black Hills region of western South Dakota, unceded Lakota territory wherein the creation of the monument was itself a violation of the Sioux Treaty of 1868 as well as a desecration of sacred land.
Gutzon Borglum, who designed and executed the the sculpture in the 1920s, was a white supremacist and known KKK affiliate who also created the Stone Mountain bas-relief frieze of Confederate figures in Georgia. In 2017, officials at Stone Mountain denied a KKK request to hold a public cross-burning ceremony. That there was any such request in 2017 is proof of the kinds of acts that such perverse symbolism encourages.
Considering this history, one must see how the purpose of the rhetoric delivered last July 4, 2020 by 45 at Mount Rushmore— “deface our most sacred memorials,” “wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children” —is to gaslight the people who have faced systemic erasure, defamation, and have been fighting for the rights of their sacred homes for several centuries now.
The purpose of monuments such as Mount Rushmore is to literally set in stone the corrupt mythology of white romanticism that keeps us (white settlers) in a state of cultural amnesia. The holiday on July 4 claims to commemorate a kind of national liberty that doesn’t actually exist for all. Going further, Thanksgiving is a deliberately baroque machination of denial intended to foster within the settler psyche a false sense of moral security for a reconciliation with Indigenous communities that has not, in fact, happened. These holidays and monuments attempt to (and succeed in their induced delusions) palpably justify the false patriotism that creates the fear and hatred that we pretend to condemn.
There are white settlers out here expressing shock about what is happening today in DC, but these tensions and messages have been written in stone on literal mountains for generations, and longer.
Was this picture worth the $9 parking pass? Maybe, probably not, I really don’t know. I can’t help but think about how all these photos of the mob at the capitol today strike me as absolutely an orchestrated PR move to further galvanize delusional white supremacists.
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