Mr. Bear Runner Goes to Rushmore

Explicit content warning

07/03/20 • 18 min

To commemorate July 4, 2020, President Trump is traveling to the Black Hills of South Dakota to give a speech in front of Mount Rushmore. But for the Lakota, the Black Hills are sacred. And the carvings of the four Presidents represent a desecration of their history and culture. As Edgar Bear Runner, a Lakota tribal historian, puts it: “Mount Rushmore is a shrine to racism. A shrine to genocide.”

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Episode One: June 26, 1975

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Treaties, Goons, and G-Men (Part 1)

The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation—full of gold, uranium, and oil—contains some of the most valuable land on the planet. But the Federal Government didn’t know that when they originally granted the territory to the Lakota in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. So for the next 100 years, the U.S. secretly took back the land piece by piece: ultimately with the help of Dick Wilson, the dictatorial Tribal Chairman of Pine Ridge, and his private militia, the GOON squad.

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LEONARD: Political Prisoner - Mr. Bear Runner Goes to Rushmore

Transcript

Episode 2: "Mr. Bear Runner Goes to Rushmore"
IKE PAPPAS:
Another Dawn rises over Mount Rushmore over Washington and Roosevelt, Jefferson and Lincoln.

VO:
This is Ike Pappas, a journalist for CBS News who reported from Mount Rushmore in 1970.

IKE PAPPAS:
But it also rises these days over a small band of American Indians who cling not only to the craggy edges of the mountain, but to the hope that som