Trump Could Use Sacred Native Land for a Monument to... Christopher Columbus [View all]

Trump’s plan for a national statue garden could get built on sacred Native land currently held by a wealthy South Dakota mining family.

https://theintercept.com/2025/06/06/trump-south-dakota-native-land-statue-garden/


Donald Trump arrives for Independence Day at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in Keystone, S.D., on July 3, 2020. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

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. 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.”

From Columbus to Trebek

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.

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