Rethinking Mount Rushmore: Marking Settler Place in Contested Land

In the context of discussions to build a National Garden of American Heroes (in part funded by the redirection of funds from government grants for research in the arts and humanities), Mount Rushmore (1927-1941), with its rendering of four past U.S. presidents, deserves further scrutiny. Recent scholarship by Harriet Senie, Douglas Allen, Joanne Connauton, and Tyler McCreary connected the site with U.S. settler colonialism and White supremacy, and more work is needed to show how the decision to build the monument, its designs, and its location were tied to the legal exigencies of a burgeoning court case that culminated in the 1980 Supreme Court decision favoring the Lakota nation.

This talk analyzes the timeline for the idea for Mount Rushmore, announced as a strategy to gain tourism beginning in summer 1923, and the initial Lakota court claim against the United States for the theft of He Sapa (the Black Hills), initiated in May 1923. This concurrence suggests greater entwinement between the public art project and the politics of Native American contestation of settler colonialism. Understanding the role of the site for Lakota origin stories and for Lakota epistemology, which designates certain rock forms as animate, reframes the monument not only as a patriotic tourist driver, but also an attempt to literally efface Lakota identity, beliefs and culture, subverting it to U.S. presidential authority. What is the legacy of this contested space in satire, continued contestation, and still prevalent perceptions of the site as a testament to American freedom and democracy?