Indigenous Activists Assert Right to Unceded Land At Anti-Trump Protest: July 3, 2020

In the 1920s, South Dakota historian Doane Robinson hired sculptor Gutzon Borglum to construct a national monument to promote tourism in the state.Gutzon was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and had recently helped construct a memorial to Confederate leaders in the state of Georgia. Some of the funding for the Mount Rushmore project came from the KKK.The mountain that was chosen for the site of the monument is known as “The Six Grandfathers” (Thuŋkášila Šákpe) by Lakota peoples, named after the Earth, the Sky, and the four directions.The nine tribes of the Great Sioux Nation never agreed to or signed away their rights to this land; the Fort Laramie treaty in 1868, which the tribes did sign, guaranteed them “undisturbed use and occupation” of the land on which the Six Grandfathers, or Mount Rushmore, is on.On July 3, 2020, coinciding with a Trump/Pence rally in Keystone, SD, Indigenous activists asserted their right to unceded treaty lands with a road blockade in anticipation of the Trump rally.Read more: https://unicornriot.ninja/2020/thousands-gather-in-keystone-south-dakota-for-trump-pence-rallyAll Unicorn Riot media is re-distributable under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons 3.0 US License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/Unicorn Riot: your alternative mediawww.unicornriot.ninja