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When President Trump came to Mt. Rushmore on the eve July 4, 2020 and gave a fiery speech blasting what he called the “left wing cultural revolution,” the Native Americans who briefly blocked the roads in protest got little attention.
They were chanting “Land back!” — referring to the Black Hills, the tribal lands where the monument stands which were in effect stolen by the US government more than 170 years ago — but were pushed away by police in riot gear.
Now a new film, “Lakota Nation vs. United States,” directed by Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli and executive produced by actor and activist Mark Ruffalo, among others, shines a light on why those demonstrators were so angry.
it also reveals how they Lakota tribe refuses to touch a $2 billion trust fund, the proceeds of an award in 1980 by the Supreme Court which recognized how their land had been stolen.
“A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history,” the court said, awarding the tribe $102 million.
The US Treasury holds the settlement in trust and has a mandate to maximize returns on it, explaining its astonishing growth, the equivalent of 7.23% compounded annually for 43 years.
But the Lakota won’t take the money: instead, they want the land back.
The Lakota say the US government broke two key treaties, beginning with the Fort Laramie treaty in 1851, guaranteeing them the Black Hills. The tribe considers the isolated mountain range rising from the Great Plains in western South Dakota to be its most sacred land.
“There’s no amount of money that can ever replace our identity and who we are as people,” Krystal Two Bulls, a Lakota activist who is a director of the Landback campaign and who is interviewed in the new film, told The Post.
“It would be like destroying Jerusalem and then still expecting people to take some money and still have a direct connection to that place. Plus if we were to take that money tomorrow and divvy it up among all the tribes from the treaties that money is nothing, it’s pennies on the dollar.”
One of the popular Lakota slogans is: “The Black Hills are not for sale!” They say their relationship with “He Sapa” – which means “Black Hills” in the Lakota language – has nothing to do with money. The land itself, the tribes said, must be returned.
“We want ownership of our land,” Krystal Two Bulls told The Post. “We want legal, titled land back. When they removed us from the land and took it away from us, they stripped us of our identity and language and dismantled our entire economy.
“We survived attempted genocide. Every single thing that settlers in the US government threw at us, we survived. We will reclaim our land.”
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Some, like the film’s director Short Bull, are publicly diplomatic about how returning the land can come about, suggesting that a good start would be “stewardship” of the lands, parts of which are overseen by the National Park Service, with others held by private owners.
The lands the tribe have lost include Mt. Rushmore.
Before the 60-foot faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln were carved into granite between 1927 and 1941, the area was Tunkasila Sakpe Paha, or Six Grandfathers Mountain, a place for prayer and devotion for Native Americans.
The faces of the four US presidents were designed by a sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, with ties to the Ku Klux Klan.
“There’s blood on the ground there,” Short Bull told The Post Tuesday. “It’s strange. I grew up in South Dakota and I live less than an hour away from the Black Hills but I rarely go there.
“Many people don’t know the history and our past there. It’s all tourism and busy-ness there now — and Mt. Rushmore is like having a bully hovering above you that you can’t do anything about.”
Another sacred site held by the National Parks Service is Wind Cave, which is at the center of the Lakota origin story and creation myth, 37 miles away from Mt. Rushmore.
Nick Tilsen, the president and CEO of NDN Collective, a Native-run non-profit based in Rapid City, S.D., was one of 20 people arrested on the day of Trump’s visit on July 3, 2020.
“What South Dakota and the National Park Service call ‘a shrine to democracy’ is actually an international symbol of white supremacy,” Tilsen said at the time. “It’s not just about physical land back. It’s also about undoing what was done to us as a people.”
The Sioux Nation comprises several tribes that speak three different dialects, the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota. The Lakota, also called the Teton Sioux, include seven tribal bands and occupy lands in both North and South Dakota. The Dakota, or Santee Sioux, live mostly in Minnesota and Nebraska, while the the Nakota, live in South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana.
The bloody history of their lands includes the largest mass execution in American history, on Dec. 26, 1862.
President Abraham Lincoln ordered the hanging of 38 Dakota men, called the “Dakota 38,” in the aftermath of the Dakota War of 1862 – also known as the Sioux Uprising.
In the aftermath of that treaties were made and broken – especially when gold was discovered in the 1870s – and white settlers converged on the area hoping to strike it rich, forcing the Lakota out, and parts of their lands eventually becoming national parks.
