Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway012919 | Hacker News Reader

Borglum was deeply inspired by the KKK as well. Not really a great part of US history. [0]

“Robinson had originally planned to include American frontiersmen like Lewis and Clark and Native Americans, including Sacagawea. But Borglum, eyeing an opportunity to make a national statement, dissuaded the historian. Instead they settled on the four American presidents, two of them slaveholders and all of them viewed by Native Americans as racist.” [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutzon_Borglum [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/07/03/mount-rush...

View on HN

From the above WaPo article:

> Native Americans have always contended that the Black Hills of South Dakota belong to them, and that the sacred land was stolen after gold was discovered there. In 1980, the Supreme Court agreed, ordering the federal government to compensate eight tribes for the seizure of Native land.

I don't think enough people know this. Or know that the tribes refused the money saying they would only accept the return of their land. The money currently sits in an account gaining interest and is over a billion dollars.[1]

I personally hope someday this land is returned to them and Mount Rushmore is removed (possibly preserved as history if technologically possible) much as we do with Confederate monuments.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hills_land_claim

It’s also vandalism of a sacred site: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/the-strang...

I always thought it was strange the way the Black Hills are said to be a sacred part of Lakota culture but they only held that area for not even 100 years between genociding off the origibal Cheyenne in the area and getting genocided by white settlers. Like how come their feelings about land they killed for mean more than other people who killed for the same land. It's strange how we treat Natives in this racist way where we ignore the fact that they were racist murdering people just like the Europeans.

All tribes were being pushed westward by white settlers and it inevitably led to conflict among the tribes. But Lakota definitely did not "genocide" the Cheyenne as is obvious by the fact that they still exist in Montana and Oklahoma.

And regardless, this has nothing to do with the US government signing a treaty giving the Black Hills to Lakota "forever" and then just a few years later driving them off the land. The US government itself says what it did was illegal by its own laws.

When you quote an article (good read though) verbatim, you ought to mark your text as a quote. It was a bit surprising to read verbatim your second paragraph while reading the article.

Great point. Updated as such. Thank you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com