Long before it became known as Mount Rushmore, the towering granite face was sacred to the Lakota people-named Thunkásila Sákpe, or "Six Grandfathers," embodying the six fundamental directions of the world in their cosmology.
In 1877, defying the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie that promised the Black Hills to the Sioux forever, the U.S. government seized the land after prospectors discovered gold. Over a century later, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the treaty's sanctity, ruling the seizure illegal and awarding financial compensation the Sioux ultimately refused-asserting that the land itself, not money, was inviolable.
In the 1920s, sculptor Gutzon Borglum, leveraging federal support, began a colossal carving of four U.S. presidents into the sacred stone. Though Borglum had previously been involved with Klan-backed Confederate memorials, there is no evidence that the Ku Klux Klan funded the Mount Rushmore project. Today, the monument stands as both a symbol of national pride and a deeply contested reminder of the legacy of treaty violations and the continued struggle for sacred land.
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