In 1877, the U.S. government expropriated the Lakota tribal lands in the Black Hills—the site of Mount Rushmore—by abrogating a major treaty. This injustice rehearsed the choice of Mount Rushmore's sculptor and chief ideologue, Gutzon Borglum, a high-ranking figure in the Ku Klux Klan, who quickly recast the monument, originally conceived as a tourist attraction meant to bolster South Dakota's economy, as a celebration of manifest destiny—the expansion of European settlement across the American West in fulfillment of white racial identity. Mount Rushmore pursues the connection between and among General Custer's defeat in the Black Hills, subsequent Custer battle commemorations, the killings at Wounded Knee, the Lakotas' dispossession of the Black Hill, and Rushmore itself. Larner examines how Rushmore has attained semireligious status as a shrine for pilgrims of Democracy, and contrasts this understanding of the monument with the government's political restrictions on the practice of American Indian religions in the Black Hills. Rushmore's history, Larner argues, is one that has ignored the monument's message of conquest to present a simplistic narrative of national glory. Moreover, even the tour guides at Rushmore don't understand that the land from which it rises belongs to somebody else.
The land, people, and history framing Mount Rushmore, situated in the Black Hills in South Dakota, not far from where Custer died, prove to be every bit as complex and fundamentally crazy-American as the presidents memorialized there. Larner finds that Sioux and Euro-Americans live out the Rushmore experience in predictably different yet unpredictably specific ways. Larner's jump-around meditations on Manifest Destiny and its discontents move from 1970s American Indian Movement activism to 1920s Ku Klux Klan backroom campaigning to 1870s gold-rushing. Unhindered by narrative linearity, Larner situates Crazy Horse the never-photographed mystic warrior and Gutzon Borglum the fantastical public sculptor as the ultimate stars of a multiethnic ensemble of the powerful, victimized, and honestly ambivalent and ties it all together with great ideological discipline and briskly paced prose. Appreciative readers of contemporary political-travel journalism can only hope Larner forgoes a career in academia his publisher identifies him as a graduate student in international relations and instead follows the freelancer's quest. An auspicious debut; recommended for libraries of all types. Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll., PA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
