The claim that Mt. Rushmore is built on the "sacred, ancient land" of the Sioux is as phony as Iron Eyes Cody
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I point this out every year around this time because the Fourth of July spawns the same, tiresome drones lecturing their betters and citing bullshit “People’s Histories” that claim that the Lakota Sioux’s ancient ancestral lands centered around Mt. Rushmore, and must be returned so that a wrong will be righted and peace will reign on the earth.
Here’s the true story, and one that’s becoming increasingly difficult to track down, because history books are being so rapidly rewritten — I only know to look for it because I was fascinated by the western Indians in my childhood and teens, and read accurate histories on the subject. And I remember.
The Sioux were nomads who wandered through the upper midwest for a few centuries, after being pushed out of the south by more powerful tribes. Only when the Spanish brought horses to the new world did permanent life on the plains become possible, and even then, it took two centuries before the animals made their way up from Mexico and Texas, where the Commanches had first discovered their utility.
The Lakota Sioux were pushed onto the Great Plains by their arch enemies, the Objibwa, in the mid-1700s, so they were on the land for barely 100 years (after they had evicted other, inferior, nomads who subsisted on a diet of sticks and dirt) before they were rounded up and set to work manufacturing beaded moccasins for the tourist trade. Tough luck for them, but stone age cultures are always displaced by more technologically advanced ones; always and forever.
Europeans first encountered the Sioux in the seventeenth century in the mixed hardwood forests of central Minnesota and northwestern Wisconsin. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Sioux began moving westward and southward, pushed by the Ojibwas, who gradually infiltrated into Minnesota from the Lake Superior area, and pulled by the abundant Plains bison herds and the diffusion of horses from the Southern Plains. While some bands had a few horses by 1707, if not earlier, the Lakotas did not fundamentally become Plains horsemen until 1750-75, by which time they had crossed the Missouri River, displacing the previous residents of the region.
UPDATE: PJ Media’s Robert Spencer makes similar observation and then goes on to suggest what, exactly, Ben & Jerry might want to do to make amends to the noble red man.
