Trump Could Use Sacred Native Land for a Monument to... Christopher Columbus

[Celerity]

Trump’s plan for a national statue garden could get built on sacred Native land currently held by a wealthy South Dakota mining family.

https://theintercept.com/2025/06/06/trump-south-dakota-native-land-statue-garden/


Donald Trump arrives for Independence Day at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in Keystone, S.D., on July 3, 2020. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

A provision buried deep in the House budget bill allocates $40 million toward President Donald Trump’s plan for a vast garden of larger-than-life statues — and it could get built on sacred Native land. The House version of the budget reconciliation bill passed last month contains funding for Trump’s proposed National Garden of American Heroes, which would lionize figures ranging from Andrew Jackson to Harriet Tubman.

While the garden does not have an official location yet, one candidate is minutes from Mount Rushmore National Memorial, the iconic carvings of presidential faces in South Dakota’s Black Hills. Trump first announced his plan for a national statue garden during a July 4, 2020, address at Mount Rushmore in response to the racial justice protesters toppling Confederate statues. The potential statue garden site near Mount Rushmore belongs to an influential South Dakotan mining family that has offered to donate the land, an offer that has support from the state’s governor.

The Black Hills, however, are sacred land to the region’s Indigenous peoples, and its ownership following a U.S. treaty violation is contested. One Native activist decried the idea of building another monument in the mountain range. “I’m quite sure,” said Taylor Gunhammer, an organizer with the NDN Collective and citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, “that Harriet Tubman would not be pleased that people trying to build the statue of her on stolen Lakota land have apparently learned nothing from her.”

From Columbus to Trebek

Trump’s vision has had a rocky road to realization. Trump’s announcement was meant to offer his own competing vision to the activists who sought to remove statues — by force or by politics — of figures like Andrew Jackson or Confederate generals. In one of the final acts of his first term, he issued a list of potential figures that alternately baffled, delighted or outraged observers. They included divisive — but inarguably historic — figures such as Jackson, who signed the Indian Removal Act that began the Trail of Tears. Also listed, however, were unexpected choices such as Canadian-born “Jeopardy” host Alex Trebek, who was naturalized in 1998.

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[Ocelot II]

1. The main purpose of this project is to be sure there's a big fat statue of Himself

front and center. And I very much doubt it will include a statue of Harriet Tubman at all (Kegbreath even wants to take her name off a ship), although I get the point about the use of sacred Native land; nor will there be statues of Native people or other people of color, or many women. It will be a celebration of White and mostly male colonizers and Civil War Confederate generals, and no matter where they put it, it will be a travesty. All the land in the US is Native land, but it would be that much more of a fuck you to Native people to put it in the Black Hills.

[underpants]

2. I'll take knuckle dragging moron for $400 Alex

Alex Trebek? He’s from Canada.

I think you’re right. He can’t get on Mt. Rushmore (not that anyone can) but this would be close enough.

[milestogo]

3. He should be forced to read the first chapter of Howard Zinn's

A People's History of the United States.

And since he doesn't read, there should be actors who give a dramatic reading. They can throw ketchup packets against the wall to demonstrate the genocide. They will need a lot of them.

[travelingthrulife]

4. Pure evil. he keeps going and someone will decide to end him.

[walkingman]

5. You would think that the US would honor our native citizens

rather than purposely agitate and denigrate them every chance we get.

[J_William_Ryan]

6. "...it could get built on sacred Native land."

There’s no limit to the fascist right’s depravity and hate.

[Buns_of_Fire]

7. In the end, Harriet Tubman would probably be replaced by George Custer.

It's a threefer for the worst president in American history:
1) Ignore the uppity black woman;
2) Memorialize a "martyr" for white supremacy;
3) Give a finger to those pesky indigenous Lakotas.