Mount Rushmore: The Six Grandfathers

The Lakota name for the mountain is Tunkasila Sakpe Paha: the Six Grandfathers. It is one of the sacred peaks of He Sapa, the Black Hills, at the center of the Lakota world. The Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight guaranteed the Black Hills to the Lakota in perpetuity.

Gutzon Borglum began carving the faces of four presidents into the Six Grandfathers on October fourth, nineteen twenty-seven. He had previously carved the first version of the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, Georgia, a project he left after a dispute. At Mount Rushmore, he carved Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. He died in March of nineteen forty-one. His son Lincoln completed the monument on October thirty-first of the same year.

The carving took place while the eighteen sixty-eight treaty violation was unresolved and remained unresolved throughout. The United States had seized the Black Hills in eighteen seventy-seven. In nineteen eighty, the Supreme Court confirmed the seizure was unconstitutional. The Lakota refused the compensation and continued to claim the land.

The monument draws roughly two million visitors a year. The Crazy Horse Memorial, seven miles southwest, was begun in nineteen forty-eight by a Lakota invitation to a sculptor named Korczak Ziolkowski as a direct counter-monument. Chief Henry Standing Bear's argument was literal: the white man has his presidents in the mountain; the Lakota should have their hero.

The rock of the Six Grandfathers is still there underneath. The faces are carved into it. The treaty is still operative federal law.