Mount Rushmore sitting, min. 2:50

“Here we are, sitting on Teddy Roosevelt’s head, giving him a headache, maybe. If we get tired of the view from here, we could move over and sit for a while on Washington or Lincoln or Jefferson, but Teddy is by far the best. There is moss growing near the back of his skull, lots of trees, firewood, boulders to lean your back against, a little hollow surrounded by pines, which makes a nice campground- especially with that cliff rising behind it on which that big “Red Power – Indian Land” sign is painted. It looks nice, doesn’t it? Actually, we’re not sitting exactly on Teddy’s head, which is bald and smooth, but in back of it, halfway toward Lincoln. We are really higher than any of these heads. One good thing about being on top of Mount Rushmore, it’s the only place around here where you don’t have to look at those big faces, these giant tourist curios, ashtrays, paperweights. I know a Santee Indian who some years ago climbed up here one night with a few friends just to pee down on the nose of one of those faces. He called it a “symbolic gesture”. The way he told it to me it was quite a feat. They had to form a human chain to make it possible for him to do it.

Don’t get me wrong – we hold no grudge against Lincoln, Jefferson, or Washington. They signed a few good treaties with us and it wasn’t their fault that they weren’t kept. What we object to is the white man’s ignorance and self-love, his disregard for nature which makes him desecrate one of our holy mountains with these oversized pale faces. It’s symbolic, too, that this “Shrine of Democracy,” these four faces, are up to their chins in one tremendous pile of rubble, a million tons of jagged, blasted, dynamited stone reaching all the way down to the visitor’s center. If you look up the mountain, the way most tourists do, you see these four heads rising out of something like a gigantic, abandoned mine dump. But nobody seems to notice that.

It’s funny that we all got the sudden urge to be up here – you, a white artist (author Richard Erdoes) with your wife, I, an old Sioux medicine man, a handful of Indian ladies with their children and grandchildren, and a bunch of young, angry, “Red Power” kids. We are all different and have come here for different reasons, each of us bringing his own private anger with him. Well, a good anger is a good thing too. It could turn into love in the end. Anger is something we can share, like food.

Listen, my white friend Richard here told me some reasons why he doesn’t like Mount Rushmore. We Indians have many reasons why we don’t like it, but he has thought up a few we never hit on. He calls these faces one big white ego trip. He says good art can’t be made with a jackhammer, and I think, being an artist, he knows what he is talking about. He says that anything that is in such disharmony with nature is bad art. Even if Michelangelo had made this monument it would still be ugly, because it fits into these mountains, our sacred Black Hills, like a red hot iron poker into somebody’s eye. Did I get you right so far?

Richard also called it a disease of our society – I guess you meant white society, not us – to confuse bigness with greatness. I got this right away, because that’s what we think, too, but you also told me something I had not known before. It was this: that the only other mountains carved up like Rushmore are some huge cliffs in Asia. They always show some Babylonian big cheese, or Egyptian pharaoh, trampling some people underfoot, and the inscription always goes like this: “I, the great king, the king of king, the living god, I smote fifty towns over there and buried the inhabitants alive, and I smashed fifty cities down here and had everybody impaled, and I conquered another fifty places on this side and had everybody in them burned up, and to show you what a big guy I am I had a thousand slaves carve up this mountain.”

What does this Mount Rushmore mean to us Indians? It means that these big white faces are telling us, “First we gave you Indians a treaty that you could keep these Black Hills forever… Then we found the gold and we took this last piece of land, because we were stronger, and there were more of us than there were of you, and because we had cannons and Gatling guns… And when you didn’t want to leave, we wiped you out, and those of you who survived we put on reservations. And then we took the gold out, a billion bucks, and we aren’t through yet. And because we like the tourists dollars, too, we have made your sacred Black Hills into one vast Disneyland. And after we did all this we carved up this mountain, the dwelling place of your spirits, and put our four gleaming white faces here. We are the conquerors.” And a million or more tourists every year look up at those faces and feel good, real good, because they make them feel big and powerful, because their own kind of people made these faces and the tourists are thinking: “We are white, and we made this, what we want we get, and nothing can stop us.” Maybe they won’t admit it to themselves, but that’s what many of them are thinking deep down inside. And this is what conquering means. They could just as well have carved this mountain into a a huge cavalry boot standing on a dead Indian.

One man’s shrine is another man’s cemetery, except that now a few white folks are also getting tired of having to look at this big paperweight curio. We can’t get away from it. You could make a lovely mountain into a great paperweight, but can you make it into a wild, natural mountain again? I don’t think you have the know-how for that.


em Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions.