American Indian Studies Associate Professor David Martinez of Arizona State University described the area as “indisputably sacred to the Lakota and a number of other indigenous nations.” But before their faces were carved there, the mountain was called Six Grandfathers. The structure shows the faces of American presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum started work on the monument in 1927 and completed it in 1941. Mount Rushmore is part of the Black Hills mountain range in South Dakota. What is the Mountain’s Significance for Native Americans? We looked at each claim in the meme, starting with the history of the region before Mount Rushmore was built, followed by an investigation into its creation and alleged KKK funding. We found the monument had a dark history of ties to the KKK, an illegal war, and the violent suppression of the Native American Lakota (also known as Sioux) people. Snopes users asked us to investigate a meme that began circulating on Facebook in July 2020 that addressed the Native American history of the land the monument is located on, as well as its ties to the white supremacist organization, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Hours before Trump’s speech, in which he condemned the removal of national monuments, Native American protesters gathered on the road leading to the memorial, calling it a symbol of white supremacy placed on their stolen land. President Donald Trump spoke there on the Fourth of July. monuments, considered a symbol of American patriotism, is the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, which became the subject of controversy after U.S. Amid nationwide protests after the May 25, 2020, killing of a Black man, George Floyd, in the custody of a white police officer in Minneapolis, Confederate monuments were taken down by demonstrators, and communities began to reassess their troubling histories.Īrguably one of the most iconic U.S. As the United States reckoned with its racist past in 2020, Snopes continued to investigate the histories of monuments across the country.

Mounty meme