Mount Rushmore’s First Dedication 100 Years Later
Black Hills — 100 years ago, Mount Rushmore would have its first dedication, and one of three dedications in its first five years of construction. The Rapid City Journal reported that three thousand people joined in the dedication on October 1, 1925, and it was also reported that same evening that project’s creative director—Gutzon Borglum—had no funding to begin construction. Since it inception, perhaps the nation’s most well known monument has had problems and most of those stories haven’t involved Indigenous people.
“Over the last 100 years, there has been little history at Mount Rushmore that reflects the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people of the Black Hills,” said Darrell Red Cloud, a fifth-generation descendant of Oglala Lakota leader Chief Red Cloud who now teaches Lakota studies at Oglala Lakota College in Kyle, South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation.