The "Mount Rushmore Protection Act" is sponsored by U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., and was discussed at a meeting of the House Natural Resources subcommittee on Federal Lands. The hearing was held July 13.
"George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt — these are imperfect men," Johnson said in the hearing. "They're not up on that monument because of their imperfections, they're up on that monument because of their strengths, because of the values that they brought to our country; the vision that they had for how we can build a more perfect union. Not perfect yet, but every day, part of that endeavor to become more perfect. So the 'Mount Rushmore Protection Act' makes it very clear that we're not going to use one nickel of taxpayer dollars to try to tear down that monument or to change its name."
The Mount Rushmore Protection Act, was introduced by Rep. Johnson Jan. 17, and it “prohibits the use of any federal funds to alter, change, destroy or remove any name, face or other feature on the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota and designates the mountain as “Mount Rushmore.”
Ice cream company Ben & Jerry shared a release asking for the return of Mount Rushmore to the Lakota people. The release said before South Dakota became a state and depicted the faces of the presidents, the mountain was called the Tunkasila Sakpe, or the Six Grandfathers, by the Lakota Sioux. They considered this mountain in the Black Hills sacred, which the Lakota Sioux call "the heart of everything that is."
The Lakota fought for years to stop colonization of the area, and then in 1851 and 1868 they signed the Fort Laramie treaties which land a "permanent home" for the Sioux in the Black Hills region. This didn't last long, as there was gold found in the hills and it became a destination for prospectors, Ben and Jerry's reported.
The Sioux were relocated to reservations soon after, and in 1927 Mount Rushmore was carved out with dynamite to depict the four presidents. The Ben and Jerry's release criticized the move saying it honored presidents who owned slaves and mistreated indigenous people.
The release noted that “In 1970, Indigenous activists climbed Mount Rushmore and occupied it for months, demanding that land be returned to the Sioux. Ten years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills had indeed been stolen, saying, 'A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never…be found in our history.' They awarded the Sioux $105 million in damages, but the Tribes refused the payment. Why? Because this sacred land is theirs — and it’s not for sale.”
The money from the judgment has been held in trust, according to Ben and Jerry's.
“I should note it wasn't all that long ago that South Dakota's tallest peak was renamed without a vote of the people, without acquiescence by the governor, or the state legislature, or people from the area," Johnson said at the hearing. "The group just decided 'well, you're tallest mount will be renamed with you like it or not,' and again, it's also not an idle threat that those faces would be torn down from the monument. There have been some pretty prominent elected voices in my state and elsewhere who called for just that to happen. We saw in Oregon not that long ago statues of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington torn down.”
