{"id":10273,"date":"2020-07-22T21:10:53","date_gmt":"2020-07-23T02:10:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/unitedresourceconnection.org\/cannon-ball-nd-58528\/tunkasila-sakpe-mt-rushmore\/"},"modified":"2020-07-22T21:10:53","modified_gmt":"2020-07-23T02:10:53","slug":"tunkasila-sakpe-mt-rushmore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unitedresourceconnection.org\/cannon-ball-nd-58528\/tunkasila-sakpe-mt-rushmore\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Tunkasila Sakpe\u2019: Mt. Rushmore"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Smudging with sage, a demonstrator stands before a no-trespass banner. Photo Courtesy: Chynna Locket<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

PART II<\/strong><\/p>\n

KEYSTONE \u2013 The Shrine of Democracy, as Mt. Rushmore Memorial is often called, was named after New York City attorney Charles E. Rushmore, who was verifying property titles in 1884 when he asked local guide Bill Challis the name of this mountain.<\/p>\n

Challis replied, \u201cNever had a name but from now on we\u2019ll call it Rushmore,\u201d according to the non-profit publication National Parks Traveler.<\/p>\n

However, the Native people from whom the location was usurped by treaty violation called it Tu\u014bk\u00e1\u0161ila \u0160\u00e1kpe, the name in the Lakota language for The Six Grandfathers. \u201cThe granite bluff that towered above the Hills remained carved only by the wind and the rain until 1927 when Gutzon Borglum began his assault on the mountain.\u201d<\/p>\n

So goes the oral history, as captured by the Chamberlain-based non-profit Native Hope, which advocates to reverse \u201cinjustice done to Native Americans.\u201d One of its main tool\u2019s is storytelling \u2013 to dismantle barriers and promote healing, it says.<\/p>\n

Lakota holy man Nicholas Black Elk named The Six Grandfathers after a vision \u201cof the six sacred directions: west, east, north, south, above, and below. The directions were said to represent kindness and love, full of years and wisdom, like human grandfathers,\u201d Native Hope documents.<\/p>\n

Borglum, fresh from sculpting on the massive Confederate Memorial bas relief at Stone Mountain in Georgia, answered the call of Black Hills tourism industry promoters to create a carving on this granite outcrop \u201cto honor the West\u2019s greatest heroes, both Native Americans and pioneers.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, Borglum had his own kind of vision and convinced backers to let him chisel and blast out the busts of U.S. President George Washington alongside White House successors Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.<\/p>\n

At U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s July 3 reelection campaign-stop here, he received applause for saying, \u201cToday, we pay tribute to the exceptional lives and extraordinary legacies of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt.\u201d<\/p>\n

He took advantage of the backdrop to fan the flames of national controversy over racist symbols in public art, part of unrest ignited a month earlier with the death of Black Minneapolis resident George Floyd under the knee of a white officer, in an incident proclaimed murder by the police chief.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,\u201d Trump said. \u201cAngry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.\u201d<\/p>\n

He received more applause for saying, \u201cI am here as your President to proclaim before the country and before the world: This monument will never be desecrated, these heroes will never be defaced, their legacy will never, ever be destroyed, their achievements will never be forgotten, and Mt. Rushmore will stand forever as an eternal tribute to our forefathers and to our freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, what turned out to be a total of 20 Native Americans and accomplices who organized a civil disobedience action against the \u201ctrespass\u201d on Lakota treaty lands were hauled off to jail.<\/p>\n

Less than 80 years since the completion of the mountain carving, more than one participant in the civil disobedience demonstration triggered by the campaign stop here recast it as the Shrine of Hypocrisy.<\/p>\n

In the leadup to the fateful day, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Chair Harold Frazier objected strenuously to the campaign stop at the monument, saying, \u201cNothing stands as a greater reminder to the Great Sioux Nation of a country that cannot keep a promise or treaty then the faces carved into our sacred land on what the United States calls Mount Rushmore.\u201d<\/p>\n

He criticized a waiver of the fireworks ban allowing the campaign event to have a show in the Black Hills during fire danger season. \u201cWe are now being forced to witness the lashing of our land with pomp, arrogance and fire hoping our sacred lands will survive,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cVisitors look upon the faces of those presidents and extoll the virtues that they believe make America the country it is today. Lakota see the faces of the men who lied, cheated and murdered innocent people whose only crime was living on the land they wanted to steal,\u201d he insisted.<\/p>\n

Washington and Jefferson owned slaves. Roosevelt coined the phrase \u201cthe only good Indian is a dead Indian.\u201d Lincoln, on the day after he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, ordered the largest mass execution in U.S. history, with the public hanging of 38 Dakota sons.<\/p>\n

Borglum was \u201conce high in the inner circle of the Klan,\u201d writes author Charles Rambow in the South Dakota State Historical Society\u2019s 1973 publication The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s: A Concentration on the Black Hills.<\/p>\n

Days before Trump\u2019s campaign stop, both Frazier and Oglala Sioux Tribal President Julian Bear Runner had publicly advocated for \u201cremoval\u201d of the landmark.<\/p>\n

After 19th Century gold discovery attracted thousands of squatters to the Black Hills and the U.S. government broke its constitutional mandate to uphold the treaty protecting the area for the Oceti Sakowin, the effigies on a sacred mountain were seen as a desperate thrust of a failed conquest.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the Lakota, this was just one more violating act of colonization,\u201d Native Hope relates.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Lakota have opposed Mount Rushmore since the very beginning,\u201d said Nick Tilsen, leader of the civil disobedience action at the Trump stopover.<\/p>\n

Tilsen\u2019s national non-profit NDN Collective called for \u201cclosure of Mount Rushmore\u201d but was quick and determined to stress that the cause is not as superficial as a symbolic sculpture.<\/p>\n

Rather it is \u201cfor the Black Hills to be returned to the Lakota\u201d in redress for more than a century of illegal use of the most sacred tract of ancestral territory.<\/p>\n

Demonstrators accused the would-be second-term chief executive with turning a blind eye to the United Nations universal principle of indigenous peoples\u2019 right to free prior and informed consent because he chose this location without asking tribal authorization.<\/p>\n

While their main demand was to honor rights under the Constitution, which holds treaties as the highest law of the land, they also stood up for human and civil rights, bearing signs and slogans including Black Lives Matter and drawing attention to the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

(Contact Talli Nauman at talli.nauman@gmail.com<\/a>)<\/p>\n

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Visit Original Source<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Smudging with sage, a demonstrator stands before a no-trespass banner. Photo Courtesy: Chynna Locket PART II KEYSTONE \u2013 The Shrine of Democracy, as Mt. Rushmore Memorial is often called, was named after New York City attorney Charles E. Rushmore, who was verifying property titles in 1884 when he asked local <\/p>\n

Read More<\/a>
Shared by Native Sun News Today<\/a> July 22, 2020<\/p>\n

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