Tag Archives: Mount Rushmore

Give the Black Hills back to the Lakota

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Close down the strip-mine gold operation in Deadwood, stop maintaining the blasphemous idols carved onto Mount Rushmore, stop maintaining the Custer National Monument, let them rot into the Earth. They poison the very heart of the Earth Mother, Wakan Tonka. That means not “Great Spirit” like it’s usually translated, but The Great Buffalo.
The Lakota and other “sioux” tribes, and other Northern Plains tribes hold the Black Hills to be exactly that Heart. It’s said that from satellite images the Black Hills look like a massive bison heart. That might be a Rorshacht test, an inkblot or a cloud that you can project onto, or a seance where the medium will tell you, or rather, you’ll tell him/her exactly what you wanted to hear.
Maybe, but it sure does look like a bison heart.
Mount Rushmore and the Gold and now, coal mining operations are literally carving the still beating heart of the Earth. The Earth screams at us to stop, but the Big Money men don’t listen.

They carve images of some of their leading Capitalists onto the walls of that heart, and command all the people of America to pay to maintain their blasphemous idolatry.
Deadwood was founded by Lt Colonel George A. Custer while he was still in the Army. An illegal encampment of illegal immigrants onto the ultimate in American Land. Unlike migrant workers with the same title, they came not to try make an honest living, not to keep alive the hope of citizenship, the fabled “land of opportunity” touted in the propaganda.

They came to slaughter Wakan Tonka slowly, carve her open and cut holes in her heart while she’s still alive.
The Supreme Court very recently ruled that the land was, indeed, illegally seized, and offered as repayment … a settlement that would be less than a hundredth of a penny on every ten dollars taken out by the greed freaks.
Close down Sturgis, close down Deadwood. Open the gates of the Concentration/POW camps like Wounded Knee and Pine Ridge “reservations”.

Give the land back and save your Pious self-righteous “concern” for whether the Lakota and other sioux will make a profit from THEIR land. Don’t ask what they will do with it, it’s none of your God-damned business. You could use that same logic to lock me into servitude, where all my property (such as it is) could be seized and administered by “those who can manage it better”.
Who’s the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, Hosni Mubarak, Queen Elizabeth the Second? Hmm? Whoever it is, by the logic which denies the Lakota and, by extension, every tribe in America, full title to their lands, anybody who is NOT the richest man in the world could have his property seized and “administered” for him by those who are richer.

Give them back their land and don’t worry about what they’ll do with it. It will be a damn sight better than what the Thieves have done with it.

None of that “Noble Savage” crap either, it’s protectionist talk, “The Noble Savage NEEDS the Great White Father (a title invented by King George the Second of England) to protect him!”

And it’s just an excuse to take what isn’t yours and pretend that you’re “helping” the victims of your thefts and murders.
There were more Congressional Medals of Honor given to U.S. soldiers for committing ONE episode of genocide, the Wounded Knee Massacre, (edited to correct) than for any other battle in any other single war in American History. Really heroic, slaughtering children and elderly, men and women alike.
More medals given the murderers for those actions than were given in the entirety of World War Two, or the American involvement therein. Such Gallantry.

On Memorial Day there’s always a tribute in Washing Tundy Sea for those given the CMOH. That ceremony is corrupted and tainted and shit-stained by the medals given for that action.

Yeah, I know I’m in a state which worships Custer, Chivington, Carson, Palmer, Stanton, and the other murderous rogues who accompanied them on their rampages.

I realize too that their descendants live all around me and will be angry that I “slandered” great-great-grandpappy like that.
Your grandfathers dishonored their own names, and you bring shame to your own by continuing to worship the murders and thefts they committed.

Give the Black Hills back to the Lakota.

How to discuss the “mosque rule” at the Powwow… Suggestions?

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The Powwow will be September 25 at Rock Ledge Ranch, “technically” according to the West Side Pioneer, local newsletter, a part of the Garden of the Gods. Which is a sacred site for American Indians.
The same people who put this really offensive sign up at Bancroft Park that Old Colorado City was the first “permanent settlement” in the region. Meaning, the First Permanent WHITE Settlement. By the way, there’s a town bordering Ft Worth called White Settlement. Name says it all, too. You can get arrested for the crime of “Being, while Black or Brown” but I digress.
Neglects the fact that even the Anasazi had settlements throughout the region, most within 300 miles of here. People in our International audience might not think that’s close, but in the Western United States, that’s known as “right around the corner”. Even the migrant tribes had their regular spots that they “migrated” to every year. Much like Rich Folks who have a summer home in the Hamptons and a winter play-house in Vail or Aspen and the beach house in Nassau, and the long term lease on that chateau in Monte Carlo. Only not exactly on a “at whim” basis.
But the Garden of the Gods, and the Medicine Wheel at Standing Bear Butte, indeed the entire Black Hills, and Hueco Tanks, and The Iowa Bluffs, all have gotten the status of being places where people can worship freely in the past 32 years. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act was passed in 1978.
What Custer was trying to break up at Little Bighorn was a RELIGIOUS GATHERING. A “punitive” expedition because several of the Tribes met on grounds the U.S. Government flatly refused to recognize as neutral. They assigned each tribe a reservation and told them to stay on those reservations.

The gathering at Little Bighorn was to make medicine against a white folks encroachment on not only Reservation Land, but holy ground, at Deadwood. By the way, if you buy “Black Hills Gold” you’re buying into the murder of the Black Hills, which are regarded as the Heart of the World.

It goes beyond the example of the Mount Rushmore statues being like breaking into the Vatican and carving your name on all the walls.

There was a Colorado Statute that forbade, on pain of DEATH, practicing the American Indian rituals.

The Garden of the Gods is ringed by interloping “private” properties which were built in defiance of the treaties establishing it as a religious site. One of them built by General William Jackson Palmer, Real Estate Thief and Corporate Welfare Recipient Extraordinaire.
His idolatrous statue is parked in the middle of the intersection of Platte and Nevada right by Acacia Park. The “good christian” City Leaders who considered and still consider the Indian rituals to be satanic have no problem at all with breaking the commandment about Graven Images and Idolatry when it comes to worship of Murderous Thieves like Palmer and Custer.

What’s that you said, Jonah? STILL oppose the Religious Freedom of the First Amendment being extended to Non-White ethnic and religious Groups?

Why, YES, children, they still ARE fighting tooth and nail in the federal courts to overturn every speck of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978.

Just like they’re trying to repeal the 14th Amendment because they don’t want Black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian, Arabic, really anybody who doesn’t measure up to, and conform to, their Lily White Anglo Saxon Protestant vision of America, to have even Basic Rights such as citizenship, even if we’re born here.

Including and now especially Religious Freedom.
Some of the Rabid Hatred coming out of the Anti-Mosque Nazi’s mouths and keyboards seek to demonize, and demand the cancellation of all rights of citizenship accorded to, Muslim, Jewish and CHRISTIAN sects that don’t join in to their Howling Hate Mob.
How long is it going to take before the Hate Freaks decide to demonize American Indians again?

George Walker Bush decided as the Imperial Governor of Texas to challenge the AIRFA 78 based on the Hueco Tanks case. And has expanded it to a huge challenge to American Indian Tribal Sovereignty in every aspect of our lives. Some of the Anti-Everybody Hate Groups want to forbid the use of non-English languages even in our homes and that is how deeply the issues cut into our lives.

They say that it cripples our childrens chances of learning the Ever-so-superior English, which they also claim to be the pre-eminent language of International Business. Which is bullshit. First they don’t want OUR kids succeeding in business, they want us to work for them at less than minimum wage and be perpetually Debt Slaves to their rigged “free” market.

Second the language of international commerce is FRENCH. Many if not most of the nations of the world have two (or more) official languages. For most of those nations French is the second. MEXICO has two official languages, one of them is Spanish, can you guess the other? But they lie to us with the dream that if we work for them diligently enough and put enough money into their pockets, through our labor, they’ll grant us a place at the Trough with the big pigs. How many dozens or hundreds of generations will that take with the Guaranteed Debt for Life wages they insist are more generous than necessary?
Lies beget further lies. They also say we have freedom of speech, unless we oppose their Big Pig government, freedom to peaceably assemble unless see above, freedom of religion except in cases which see above, freedom of the press except see above…

They say it’s the “original intent” of a mysterious and shifting group they call the “Founding Fathers”.

If we were to accept all the entrants in that parade of Farcical Founding Fathers, we run across bigots, slaveowners and one in particular, the one they cite as a Founding Father (actually two, with the same name, Cotten Mather) Fundamentalist preachers two hundred years before the term Fundamentalist was invented. One of whom said that American Indians, since we weren’t mentioned in Genesis, must be constructs of Satan, demons in human form.

Conveniently forgets that the continents of North and South America and Australia and Antarctica aren’t mentioned in Genesis either.

So let’s narrow it down a little more, get a real grip on the “original Intent” of the “founding fathers” regarding freedom of speech, press, religion, association… say, the Delegates to the Constitutional Convention.
How unanimous was this Original Intent? May to September, 4 months, and had not ONE unanimous accord for any of the Articles. And the Bill of Rights? The majority of them voted against it being included. That’s why they’re the first ten AMENDMENTS.

But these Dead Rich Bastards are supposed to tell us that the actual words of the Constitution don’t mean what they say, we’re supposed to do a Mass National Seance and divine what their original intent on it is. Especially on the issue of Religious Freedom.

Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck and the rest of the Right Wing “leaders” are doing nothing to rebuke the Extremist Racists in their party, such as Pamela Geller, who proposes imprisoning or banishing CHRISTIANS and JEWS who don’t fall into line and chant the anti-Mosque Hate Mob Speech.

This religious freedom which the Right Wing FREAKS attack under the name of “Liberty” is at the core of national sovereignty issues. They also call themselves “nationalists” but refuse to grant the same rights of sovereignty to OTHER NATIONS. Iraq and Afghanistan leap to mind. Honduras, Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, there’s a long list. Including every Indian Treaty ratified under the auspices of Article 6 of the Constitution, and thus having the full force of law equally to the Constitution itself.

They set themselves up as Imperialists under the name “nationalism”. In Maritime Law that’s called “flying false colors” something pirates do.

It’s also called “Lying”.

What happens if these freaks can dismantle constitutional law and the treaties entered into, in accordance with the Constitution?

Simple. They’ll be declaring the Corporate Government of America to be Divinely Anointed Emperors of the entire world. Sarah Palin even says that GOD tells her that it’s His wishes to do so.

Funny how God doesn’t just tell everybody else that all at once, isn’t it?

Funny how God tells them and nobody else that they have a Divine Mission to take over lands belonging to other people, like the Iraqis and Iranians and North Koreans and the Tsalagi (cherokee) Tribe with the sacred mountain at Chattanooga Tennessee…

Funnier still how all these places, like with the Black Hills gold mines, and the Sacred Mountain in Chattanooga, which has coal reserves their corporations covet, and of course the Oil Fields of Arabia and Persia and Africa and Venezuela… all put money into the pockets of the Corporations who they also swear allegiance to.

Real funny, ain’t it? Ska-roo that noise.

The Lakota saw six grandfathers where Mt Rushmore fests expansionist four

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A recurring discussion at the base of Mount Rushmore is whose face next belongs alongside America’s fantastic four. There’s room for more obviously, as the mountain’s Lakota name was the Six Grandfathers. They saw resemblance enough in the rocks without the Denver Mint faces. Visitors can be excused not recognizing Theodore Roosevelt, the only cameo without a coin –he lacks a DC monument too, but Teddy most certainly belongs here. To determine who else might qualify, we have to wonder at what exactly Mt Rushmore means to memorialize.

Mount Rushmore immortalizes above all a New York lawyer who persevered for half a century to assure the not inobscure landmark was named after him. The government approved carve-up was intended to draw visitors to South Dakota. Concurrent tourist spot projects included the cement dinosaurs of Rapid City and Wall Drug. The icon-fashioned mountain became its own icon, casting a Cliff Notes summary of American History into stone. Whatever posterity would have to say about their legacy, these presidents would remain an unscalable height above reproach.

George Washington was father of our country, if not what today we hold as our ideals. Washington wanted to liberate colonial profits from the tiers owed its royal investors. He fought only for the independence of the American propertied class, and faced revolt from the common soldiery who bore the brunt of fighting off the British.

Thomas Jefferson pushed us west and invented the facade of democracy based on an illusory “all men created equal” utopian agrarian society. Jefferson would have known that no farms can operate without farmhands, and that peasant revolts have never sparked revolution. Above all, who was Jefferson to pretend that you can keep everyone down on the farm once they’d seen Paree? A farmer can imbibe education and culture only if he’s got slaves doing the work.

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and held the union together. An America divided would have been vulnerable to resorption by the European powers. More important, the engine of our export economy was the South. Cotton and tobacco dwarfed fur.

Theodore Roosevelt championed conservation, like the national parks, but he’s on the mountain because he took America’s Manifest Destiny international. Roosevelt oversaw industry extend its empire-building offshore in search of cheap labor, resources and markets.

When conversation turns to whose face should adorn the pantheon of American expansionists, we are not lacking for capitalist do-gooders. I overheard “Obama”, “Henry Ford” or “Bill Gates,” perfectly in keeping with the theme.

In chronological order after the Rough Rider, to my mind, JP Morgan could be the beginning and the end, as father of the malevolent banking monopoly which has fated the world to Potterville.

Improving Rushmore would naturally be to efface it. How much longer really are the sculpted heads going to look like a “feat of engineering” and not simply a defilement of nature? Already what’s praised as a “work of art” looks more like a bad tattoo. Native American voices oppose the nearby Affirmative Action Crazy Horse Monument because no Indian they say would want his image superimposed on landscape.

If we can’t take it down, I have a suggestion for an additional face that neither perpetuates the enshrinement of our patronizing leadership, nor pretends to reflect a rehabilitated self-awareness. I propose we conduct an essay contest among American school children. From the dead-last, dumbest entry we select a child’s face to represent our nation’s failed intellectual promise, product of poor schooling, propaganda and poisoned spirit. That would be the face to commemorate America’s hard-headed, dumb as a brick, jackboot future.

Landmarks in memoriam

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Mount Rushmore public cafeteria
A past love of mine spent a couple summers working at Mt Rushmore at the visitor’s center. She longed for me to see it and eventually she took me there. I had already formed a vivid image of her youthful days there, serving food to plaid-clad tourists, taking her breaks sunning on the rocks between the ponderosa, chasing boys with her friends, away from home at this summer camp for Dakota high-schoolers off soon to college and new autonomous lives.

Her farm country heritage was a mystery to me, but her descriptions of the Black Hills and Mt Rushmore I could see clearly. When we finally made it there, the atmosphere was as charming as I had envisioned, aided too by preconceptions of the familiar dark wood trimmings of a US National Park with Yogi Bear. The restaurant really was a cafeteria, the workers dressed in white like nurses and the food was like they served in school. Except that visitors would carry their fiberglass trays to tables beneath huge plate glass windows with a view of the granite presidential face of Mt Rushmore.

Years later I would recognize the unchanged lunch room and viewing deck as filmed in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Nothwest. I could watch that scene and recollect our visit, especially the tour Kim gave me through the staff-only area, climbing paths around the workers’ dormitories which led us to the swimming hole. We watched squirrels and bears -I mean birds- and recalled her earlier days. She might have been thinking of earlier beaus, what would it have mattered? Now my recollections are of recollections.

Now many years later, another love asks me if revisiting the site of a cherished memory would diminish it. I said no, and I still believe it, but I have to add one caveat. It’s not that you erase one memory with another, you jeopardize the memory tape itself.

I thus revisited Mt Rushmore, without of course my making any todo about a past significance, and I came away changed and less happy because the visitors center is gone.

Well, it’s changed, the wooden building is replaced by a bigger, improved center of granite, very attractive and swarming with more people, the grounds are now entirely covered in cement, comprising amphitheater, museum, Grecian monument and vast parking structures. No amount of smooching with a new love would have effaced my earlier nostalgia, but the physical anchor of my memory is broken away. It’s like the difference of a grandparent passed on, being cremated versus interred. You can visit your loved one in a cemetery, even if only in your mind, because you know where you can find them, still there.

My Mt Rushmore in not “there” anymore. I retain my memories, themselves of memories, but they have become intangible.

The same was done to our Garden of the Gods. We used to be able to goof off on its roads and paths, now they are paved and redirected into an uncompromising giant roundabout. And there’s now the giant visitors center, with its big window and stepped-back view, replacing the Hidden Inn which used to nestle right against the rocks.

In fact, I took a favorite photograph of a girl I liked very much on the weathered railing of the Hidden Inn looking out on the upended rock formation extending along the Front Range. But the historic inn is no more, just a few cuts into the red stone, now just a point-of-interest on a marker. At least the original foundation was meticulously removed, not buried under concrete. I lament never having kissed that girl, and I guess now the opportunity seems all the more gone.