Trump Could Use Sacred Native Land for a Monument to… Columbus

The Intercept

06-06-2025

A provision buried deep in the House budget bill allocates $40 million toward President Donald Trump's plan for a vast garden of larger-than-life statues — and it could get built on sacred Native land.
The House version of the budget reconciliation bill passed last month contains funding for Trump's proposed National Garden of American Heroes, which would lionize figures ranging from Andrew Jackson to Harriet Tubman.
While the garden does not have an official location yet, one candidate is minutes from Mount Rushmore National Memorial, the iconic carvings of presidential faces in South Dakota's Black Hills. Trump first announced his plan for a national statue garden during a July 4, 2020, address at Mount Rushmore in response to the racial justice protesters toppling Confederate statues. 'I'm quite sure that Harriet Tubman would not be pleased.'
The potential statue garden site near Mount Rushmore belongs to an influential South Dakotan mining family that has offered to donate the land, an offer that has support from the state's governor.
The Black Hills, however, are sacred land to the region's Indigenous peoples, and its ownership following a U.S. treaty violation is contested. One Native activist decried the idea of building another monument in the mountain range.
'I'm quite sure,' said Taylor Gunhammer, an organizer with the NDN Collective and citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, 'that Harriet Tubman would not be pleased that people trying to build the statue of her on stolen Lakota land have apparently learned nothing from her.'
Trump's vision has had a rocky road to realization. Trump's announcement was meant to offer his own competing vision to the activists who sought to remove statues — by force or by politics — of figures like Andrew Jackson or Confederate generals.
In one of the final acts of his first term, he issued a list of potential figures that alternately baffled, delighted or outraged observers. They included divisive — but inarguably historic — figures such as Jackson, who signed the Indian Removal Act that began the Trail of Tears. Also listed, however, were unexpected choices such as Canadian-born 'Jeopardy' host Alex Trebek, who was naturalized in 1998.
Some of the names never got American citizenship at all — including Christopher Columbus.
Joe Biden canceled the idea after taking the presidency, but Trump quickly revived it after his second inauguration.
The National Endowment for the Humanities was placed in charge of commissioning artists, who are required to craft 'classical' statues in marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass and barred from abstract or modernist styles.
The statue-making process has drawn its own skeptics about whether Trump can fulfill a vision of having the garden ready by July 4, 2026, the nation's 250th birthday. The process of selecting a site and building Trump's vision of a 'vast outdoor park' in time could be just as daunting, however.
The Interior Department declined to comment on the site selection process, with a spokesperson saying that the garden was still in the 'planning and discussion phase.'
'We are judiciously implementing the President's Executive Order and will provide additional information as it becomes available,' spokesperson J. Elizabeth Peace said.
One of the few publicly known site candidates emerged in March, when Republican South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden issued a press release flagging the Black Hills as a potential location. In his announcement, he noted that the Lien family of Rapid City, South Dakota, had already offered land it owns near Mount Rushmore.
The Lien family, which has major interests in South Dakota mining projects, is also developing a theme park resort in Rapid City and a lodge nearby in the Black Hills. The family owns dozens of acres near the historic Doane Robinson tunnel, which offers motorists a framed view of Mount Rushmore.
The vision of another monument in the Black Hills, however, would place South Dakota politicians on a collision course with some Native tribal members who have long lamented the creation of Mount Rushmore.
The Lakota Sioux called the mountain the Six Grandfathers and ventured to it for prayer and devotion, according to National Geographic. The entire Black Hills were sacred ground for the Lakota and other tribes.
The Black Hills were promised to the Oceti Sakowin peoples as part of a Great Sioux Reservation in an 1868 treaty, but the U.S. government broke its promise when gold was discovered there. 'The fact that it was built in the Black Hills was not an accident or happenstance.'
The Oceti Sakowin Oyate, commonly known as the Sioux Nation, won a 1980 Supreme Court case finding that they had been wrongfully deprived of the land. They rejected the court's finding that they should receive monetary compensation and continued to seek return of the land. (Several tribes involved in the case did not respond to requests for comment about the proposed statue garden.)
Some Indigenous people in South Dakota see the carved faces on Mount Rushmore as a defacement of land that rightfully belongs to them.
'The fact that it was built in the Black Hills was not an accident or happenstance,' Gunhammer said. 'It is representative of the exact colonial presence that the settler colonial project has always been trying to have in the Black Hills.'
Mount Rushmore is a point of pride for other South Dakotans, as well as an economic boon. Sam Brannan, a Lien family member who supports the project, said she was hopeful that the White House would take them up on their offer to build another patriotic attraction nearby.
'We're just honored and hopeful that they will consider our site,' she said. 'The people they have selected are amazing. I hope everybody goes through those 250 names. They are very representative of the United States.'
The statue garden proposal comes at the same time as a family-owned company, Pete Lien and Sons, seeks to conduct exploratory drilling for graphite in the Black Hills near Pe' Sla, another sacred ceremonial site for the Lakota.
Gunhammer has been active in organizing tribal members against the proposed mining activity, which would happen on U.S. Forest Service land.
'The same company trying to build this national hero garden in order to preserve history is currently trying to undertake a project that destroys history for everyone,' he said.
'The same company trying to build this national hero garden in order to preserve history is currently trying to undertake a project that destroys history for everyone.'
Brannan referred questions about the mining project to Pete Lien and Sons, which did not respond to a request for comment sent through its website.
With regards to the national garden, Brannan said that Native tribes have not been consulted on the family's offer yet. 'Why would we? It's been privately held for 60 years,' she said.
Still, Brannan said the tribes could be consulted if the project advances. She said no one organization can claim to speak for all the Lakota people, and that her family maintains warm relations with Native leaders.
'We have been in mining for 80 years in the Black Hills, so we have been great neighbors to the Lakotans here,' she said, referring to one of the subgroups that makes up the Oceti Sakowin people.
In a statement, Josie Harms, the press secretary for the South Dakota governor, noted that the potential list of figures to be honored includes Native leaders such as Sitting Bull, the Lakota leader who defeated George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
'The tract of land in question is private property owned by Chuck Lien and his family,' said Harms, referring to the family patriarch who died in 2018. 'As a result, it will cause no disruption to either state or tribal land. As a federal project, the state will be a partner with the federal government as it seeks to comply with its regulations or consultation, as needed.'
The Trump administration has yet to detail how it will select the site for the statue garden, although numerous states and counties pitched the Interior Department five years ago.
Brannan said it was her understanding that more than 20 sites are being considered. Her family has not had direct contact with the Trump administration, she said.
One factor in the Black Hills site's favor is that the garden is gaining momentum at a high-water mark for the political influence of the twin Great Plains states of North and South Dakota.
Former South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who first championed the idea, is serving as Trump's Homeland Security secretary. South Dakota Sen. John Thune is the upper chamber's majority leader. Former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum is serving as the secretary of the Interior Department, the executive tapped with finding the location for the garden.
South Dakota's lone U.S. representative, Dusty Johnson — like Noem, Thune, and Burgum, a Republican — told The Intercept that the Black Hills have a strong shot. He has been pushing the idea with the Trump administration.
'I don't want to speak for the administration, other than I would tell you every conversation I have had with them, they understand the value of this particular parcel, and that they are going to give the Black Hills of South Dakota a full and complete look,' he said. 'We're going to have a real chance to win.'
The House's plan to spend tens of millions of dollars on the garden is laid out in the same reconciliation bill that would kick 11 million people off health insurance, according to a recent Congressional Budget Office estimate.
To make it into law, the spending provision would have to win Senate approval. Thune's office didn't respond to a request for comment.
The House bill does not specify whether the money should be spent on the site or the statues. Money from hundreds of National Endowment for the Humanities grants that the Trump administration canceled could be redirected to pay for the statues, the New York Times reported in April.
The National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts have jointly committed $34 million for the project, including $30 million from this year's budget for the statues.
Some of the National Endowment for the Humanities grants that were canceled would have supported Native cultural projects in South Dakota.
The roster of grants killed includes $60,000 for an anthology of Lakota and Dakota literature in translation and $205,000 for an Oglala language archiving project, according to a list maintained by the Association for Computers and the Humanities.