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In a move akin to building a statue of Vladimir Putin in Kyiv, President Donald Trump, whose dream of a $40 million “garden of heroes” was allocated in the House version of the budget reconciliation bill passed last month, may propose erecting the oversized monuments on sacred Native land minutes from Mount Rushmore.
The creation of the monument — construction was approved in 1927 — to America presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt generated significant opposition from native tribal members. The mountain was known by the Lakota Sioux as “the Six Grandfathers” and, according to National Geographic, was a favored destination for prayer and devotion.
The entire Black Hills area is considered sacred ground for the Lakota and other tribes. They were promised to the Oceti Sakowin peoples in a 1868 treaty, but once gold was discovered there, the U.S. government reneged.
Building anything on the land would be controversial; many indigenous people still consider Mount Rushmore a defacement of land that is rightfully theirs.
“The fact that it was built in the Black Hills was not an accident or happenstance,” said Taylor Gunhammer, an organizer with the NDN Collective and citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. “It is representative of the exact colonial presence that the settler colonial project has always been trying to have in the Black Hills.”
That monuments to historical figures who approved the murder, exploitation and forced removal of Native American tribes are planned for the garden make the project even harder to swallow for indigenous South Dakotans.
Statues of Christopher Columbus, who committed atrocities against native populations across the New World, and former President Andrew Jackson, architect of the Trail of Tears, an effective genocide of Native Americans in which 60,000 people were forced from their ancestral homelands, are among those planned.
The project calls for 250 statues to be completed in time for America’s 250th birthday on July 4, 2026. Experts say that’s an impossible deadline, due to the country’s lack of professional sculptors and museum-caliber foundries.
“It seems completely unworkable,” Daniel Kunitz, editor of Sculpture magazine, told Politico.
In a 2020 executive order authorizing the monument garden, Trump floated an eclectic list of candidates, including historical figures like Patrick Henry, Harriet Tubman and Eleanor Roosevelt, leading cultural and economic figures such as Muhammad Ali, Whitney Houston and Steve Jobs. There are even a few non-Americans expected to be included, like the late “Jeopardy” host Alex Trebek, born and raised in Canada.
“It’s going to be something very extraordinary,” Trump told a White House audience in February. “We’re going to produce some of the most beautiful works of art.” His executive order states the garden will “reflect the awesome splendor of our country’s timeless exceptionalism.”
Critics say the besides the inclusion of controversial figures like Columbus, Jackson and John James Audubon, who supported his work with birds by trafficking enslaved people, Trump was decidedly partisan with a large segment of those he’s proposed. Conservative thought leaders like Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley Jr., Jeane Kirkpatrick and William Rehnquist, far outnumber liberal intellectuals of significance.
Gunhammer noted that he believed Tubman would be appalled by the idea of a statue of herself standing on “stolen Lakota land” and that the project’s proponents “have apparently learned nothing from her.”
If the garden comes to fruition, the Black Hills are viewed as a likely destination.
The Lien family, which has large financial stakes in South Dakota mining projects and is developing a theme park resort in Rapid City, has offered to donate the land it owns near Mount Rushmore. The state’s mostly Republican political leadership supports the plan, as does former governor Kristi Noem, current head of the Department of Homeland Security.
Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum, former governor of neighboring North Dakota, is in charge of the location search.
Sam Brannan, a Lien family member, told The Intercept native leaders have not been consulted on the project.
“Why would we?” she said. “It’s been privately held for 60 years.”
“We have been in mining for 80 years in the Black Hills, so we have been great neighbors to the Lakotans here,” Brannan continued.
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