Destruction of cultural sites has always been the American Way

The Amerindian population in the New World was some 112 million at the time of European arrival and in what is now the United Snakes it was about 25 million. Today's Native population is about 5.2 million with some 2.5 million living on reservations and if he were alive today Thomas Jefferson would be surprised any American Indians survived at all.

In the early twentieth century after President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House white supremacists began erecting statuary commemorating and celebrating treason in the United States. Mount Rushmore in occupied South Dakota is the state's premier example of white supremacist ideology. Its sculptor was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

As yet another sacred site in the Black Hills is being probed because of the 1872 Mining Law threatening to destroy Iranian cultural centers is simply another American tradition.

Itching to steal land from the Great Sioux Reservation, Dakota’s Yankton Press printed the following call to break the Fort Laramie Treaty—which created the sprawling reservation, secured the Black Hills for the tribes, and stipulated that the American military would abandon its posts and forts on the land and hold accountable any citizens who violated the treaty—in an 1868 column: “The Indians can make no use of the country which has been set apart for them. The pine lands and mineral deposits are of no value to them, because they neither have the knowledge or inclination to utilize them,” the newspaper declared. “The government owes it to the country, and particularly to Dakota, to remove every obstacle to the immediate opening up and development of this vast field of untold and incalculable wealth.” [Nick Martin, America Has Never Cared About Sacred Sites]

44 presidential statues already sit or stand on corners downtown Rapid City and the City of Presidents Foundation leaders want to focus on the message it will send to visitors without invoking the town's long history of bigotry. Fact is: most of the downtown statues depict slave owners, war criminals, figures in history that ordered the murders of American Indians and at least one child raper.

Photo: a May thunderstorm engulfs Mato Paha (Bear Butte).