Is Mount Rushmore on sacred Native American land?
Learn more about Mount Rushmore National Memorial and the history of its site.
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Transcript
Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a colossal sculpture in the Black Hills of South Dakota in the United States. Construction began in 1927.
The memorial features 60-foot-tall representations of four U.S. presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.
But the Black Hills had a life before they were turned into a celebration of American patriotism.
Before Europeans reached the Great Plains, the Black Hills were a sacred place for the Lakota Sioux people.
Tunkasila Sakpe Paha, or Six Grandfathers Mountain, the granite formation that would become Mount Rushmore, was for the Sioux a place for prayer and devotion.
In 1868, with U.S. expansion pushing ever westward, the Sioux signed the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie with the United States government.
The document promised that the Black Hills would remain exclusively Sioux territory.
But when gold was discovered in the Black Hills, white prospectors invaded, accompanied by U.S. military troops assigned to “protect” the gold hunters.
After several years, U.S. forces pushed the Sioux off their land, breaking the Treaty of Fort Laramie and making way for Six Grandfathers Mountain to be carved into a U.S. national memorial.