Is Mt. Rushmore Too Close to Hallowed Ground?

<a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dean_Franklin_-_06.04.03_Mount_Rushmore_Monument_%28by-sa%29.jpg">Dean Franklin</a>/Wikimedia

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Omaha, Nebraska—By now, I’ve had a little bit of time to chew over the Wounded Knee massacre monument, and it’s still kind of gnawing at me. So I’ll just give you a short sketch, to give you a better sense of what the place is like:

Try to imagine a national cemetery, immaculate and regimented, and then visualize the exact opposite of it, and you’ll maybe get a decent mental image. When you approach the monument, grasshoppers the color of honey dijon scatter at your feet as if tossed from a see-saw, and the wind cuts through the prairie from the south like entrance music. Cook Islanders had 32 words for wind; I can’t speak for the Oglala, but here on the northern plains, in the poorest patch of the richest nation on the face of the Earth, amid acres of wavy wheatgrass and milkwort and sunflowers, and badlands like so many miles of drip-castles in a desert, the wind is the life that rushes through the land when all else has gone to rest.

The cemetery—which includes the monument to the victims of the Wounded Knee massacred by US troops in 1890, along with the graves of Oglala spanning a century—sits on an elevated plot of ground with views of the valley below, provided you’re standing outside the chain-link fence that surrounds the central area.

The physical monument itself, which is only a small part of the Wounded Knee cemetery, is more like a collection basket. Well-wishers have left pennies, nickels, dimes, bundles of dried prairie grasses, small rocks, suggested reading materials, feathers, incense, bottles of Dasani, a Bhutan prayer flag, and one very lonely butterscotch sucker. To complete this scene, add a few brigades of ants, because people keep on leaving food, and nothing must go to waste.

We’re the only other white people there, save for a young couple from Belgium, passing through on their way to Badlands. When Ian Frazier checked the place out in On the Rez, he was the only white American there, too (in his case, the tourists were German). If you’re on vacation, piled two rows deep in the minivan, Wounded Knee isn’t exactly the low-stress environment you’re looking for. What do you tell the kids, anyway?

So, that’s the cemetery. Now that I’ve had some time to think, though, I’m struck by what surrounds the monument as much as the immediate beauty. Over the last few weeks, I’ve picked up bits and pieces of the debate (one-sided as it is) over whether it’s “right” to build an Islamic community center two blocks away from New York’s ground zero. I didn’t expect the issue to last this long, but it’s apparently the No. 1 crisis facing America right now; I guess you just never know. Anyway, here on the plains, where the Oglala Sioux are surrounded by both living and inanimate monuments to their fate, it’s tough to express just how dissonant that all feels.

For the uninitiated, Wounded Knee is where, in 1890, Union soldiers killed more than a hundred Oglala in the dead of winter, on account of a particular form of religious expression called the “Ghost Dance,” which the federal government had declared illegal. Just two South Dakota blocks* away from the monument, you’ll find the town of Whiteclay, Nebraska, a town built almost exclusively to sell alcohol to Indians on the reservation—after alcohol had been banned on the reservation. Of course, the reason they were living on Pine Ridge in the first place was because the US had reneged on an established treaty and driven the Sioux out of their sacred grounds in the Black Hills, because someone had found gold. When that was finished, they marked the occasion by carving a massive monument to themselves on the side of a mountain. They even found a Klan-member to design the thing. And voila, Mount Rushmore.

Which is not to say you shouldn’t still take your kids to Mount Rushmore, or watch North By Northwest, or get into donnybrooks over which president you’d replace and who you’d replace him with (the correct answer is Thomas Jefferson, because of his second term, and Martin Van Buren, because of the mutton chops). Just that if you want to establish a precedent of banning all references to “offensive” constructions from hallowed patches of American ground, you’d better hope there’s a grandfather clause, too.

*South Dakota is really, really big. This basically means “20 minutes.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate