Mount Rushmore

Description

"General George A. Custer discovered gold in the Black Hills in 1874. In 1877, the government expropriated the Lakota tribal lands in the Black Hills - the site of Mount Rushmore - by abrogating a major treaty. This injustice rehearsed the choice of Mount Rushmore's sculptor and chief ideologue, Gutzon Borglum, a high-ranking figure in the Ku Klux Klan, who quickly recast the monument, conceived in the 1920s as a tourist attraction to bolster the faltering South Dakota economy, as a celebration of manifest destiny - the expansion of European settlement across the American West in fulfillment of white racial identity. Mount Rushmore pursues the connections between and among Custer's defeat in the Black Hills, subsequent Custer battle commemorations, the killings at Wounded Knee, the Lakota's dispossession of the Black Hills, and Rushmore itself.". "Mount Rushmore also traces modern political uses of the monument, from Cold War television broadcasts to Boy Scout conventions to political campaigns. Larner examines how Rushmore has attained semi-religious status as a shrine for pilgrims of Democracy, and contrasts this understanding of the monument with the government's political restrictions on the practice of American Indian religions in the Black Hills.". "By describing the complications in Rushmore's past, Larner confronts its authorized history head on. It is a history, Larner argues, that has ignored the monument's message of conquest to present a simplistic narrative of national glory. Moreover, even the tour guides at Rushmore understand little of its real history, or the legal fact that the land from which it rises belongs to somebody else."--BOOK JACKET.

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