'The Rushmore story is hard to tell': how an Indigenous park leader revealed the monument's dark side

[cbabe]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/26/mount-rushmore-native-american-history

‘The Rushmore story is hard to tell’: how an Indigenous park leader revealed the monument’s dark side

As memorial marks 100 years, Gerard Baker, park’s Native American ex-superintendent believes if Rushmore’s story is told the right way, ‘people are going to be leaving pissed’

Matthew Davis
Sun 26 Oct 2025 12.00 EDT

Despite suffering heart attacks, strokes and the effects of diabetes, Gerard Baker can still easily lift an 80lb bag of feed for the cows he raises on his south-east Montana ranch. On the sprawling 640-acre property of pine and cottonwoods, buffalo grass and blue grass, Baker drives out early in the mornings to feed his cows and think about what he could have done differently.

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On 1 June 2004, Gerard Baker became the first Native American superintendent at Mount Rushmore national memorial, and his six years at the helm were both transformative and turbulent.

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One hundred years later, the national memorial is a lightning rod of political and historical interpretation. In summer 2020, Donald Trump gave a speech at Rushmore that offered a narrow view of American history and the memorials and monuments meant to reflect that history. More recently, Rushmore has become a totem for Maga America, with legislation introduced to carve Trump into the granite. Yet the memorial stands on land that reflects the darker side of our nation’s past, a history the Trump administration is keen to erase.

The Black Hills, the Paha Sapa in Lakota, are sacred to the Lakota, and the US took the Paha Sapa from the Lakota Nation in early 1877, after the tribe had defeated George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn the previous June. The Lakota call the Black Hills the Heart of Everything That Is, and when the US stole the landscape of ponderosa pine and granite, it broke the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie and began a process to erase Native American culture and history.

During his six years as leader at Rushmore, Baker, who is now 71, worked to reintroduce this history at Mount Rushmore and expand the memorial’s interpretation to include stories and histories of the Indigenous American tribes who have called the Paha Sapa home for thousands of years. He hired local, Native American interpreters to tell their tribes’ stories; set up tipis to educate visitors and recruited hoop dancers to perform at Rushmore’s large auditorium to showcase Indigenous culture. For Baker, these efforts were the culmination of a career spent expanding the interpretation of our national parks.

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Matthew Davis is an award-winning journalist and author based in Washington DC. His latest book, A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore (11 November 2025) marks the memorial’s 100th anniversary in 2025.

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[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[progressoid]

2. The Black Hills of South Dakota are both a beautiful and ugly part of our history.