Six Grandfathers Black Hills: the Oglala Sioux Council voted 13-0 against Trump’s Rushmore event. He held it anyway and called stolen land a lie.
On June 9, 2026, the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council voted thirteen to nothing against the event. The resolution said it should not occur, citing the Fort Laramie Treaty, the wildfire risk of setting off fireworks over a drought-dry forest, and the protection of sacred sites. Governor Larry Rhoden said the celebration was not negotiable. The National Park Service approved it. On the evening of July 3 the President stood beneath the carved faces and told the country that people who say Americans live on stolen land are peddling Marxist lies.
The mountain already had a name
It is called Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe. The Six Grandfathers. It stands in He Sapa, the Black Hills, which the Lakota describe as the heart of everything that is — a place of origin for dozens of Native peoples, revered by more than fifty others. Gutzon Borglum began blasting the granite in 1927. The National Park Service, which runs the memorial, states in its own materials that the site selection “completely disregarded the site’s existing cultural significance.”
Two million people visit each year. The state of South Dakota calls it a shrine to democracy. Nick Tilsen, who is Oglala Lakota and runs the Rapid City-based NDN Collective, has a different description: an international symbol of white supremacy, carved into the face of a mountain the Lakota have never stopped opposing the carving of.
The court has already ruled on this
The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty set the Great Sioux Reservation, He Sapa included, aside for the “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians.” Article 12 required the signatures of three-quarters of all adult Lakota men before any part of it could be ceded.
In 1874 Custer’s expedition announced gold in the Hills. Miners came. The Army, which had been expelling trespassers, stopped expelling them and began campaigning against the Lakota instead. In 1876 Congress cut off food rations to the reservation until the Hills were surrendered, and a commission secured signatures from roughly ten percent of the adult male population, under threat of starvation. Congress passed the seizure into law in 1877.
In 1980, in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, the Supreme Court held the taking illegal and ordered compensation. Justice Blackmun’s opinion contains a sentence that the United States wrote about itself: a more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history.
Forty-six years of refusing the money
The Court awarded the compensation. It has never been collected. Accepting the payment would settle the matter in law — it would convert the Hills from stolen land into land that was sold, and extinguish the claim to the ground itself. So the award sits in a United States Treasury account, drawing interest, untouched since 1980. It has passed two billion dollars. Some of the poorest communities in the country have declined to spend a cent of it for forty-six years.
That refusal is not a memorial gesture, and it is not grief. It is the mechanism by which the claim stays open. Every year the money is not taken is another year in which the legal question of who owns He Sapa remains unresolved in the only forum that matters — which is to say, unresolved in fact, on the ground, regardless of what the Treasury has set aside to make it go away.
The NDN Collective’s He Sapa LANDBACK campaign proceeds from the position that judicial remedies have now been exhausted, and that what remains is legislative. This is not a novel or fringe idea. In 1987 Senator Bill Bradley introduced a bill, drafted by Lakota people, to return 1.3 million acres of federal land — not private holdings — to the Great Sioux Nation. All nine tribes in South Dakota support the return of the Black Hills.
The treaty violations did not stop in 1877
The Oglala resolution opposing the fireworks did not confine itself to the nineteenth century. It named the Dewey Burdock and Craven Canyon uranium projects. It named Keystone XL and the Dakota Access Pipeline. It named the Sentinel missile program. All of these sit in the territory of the Great Sioux Nation, and the resolution states that all of them have destroyed sacred sites and cultural resources.
It cited the Winters Doctrine — the principle that reserved lands carry reserved water rights — and the generation of hydroelectric power on the Missouri River without compensation to the tribes whose water it is. It cited federal budget cuts and the distress the Nation is already living with. And it cited the arrests of Lakota people by ICE in Minneapolis during deportation sweeps.
A settler reading of the treaty question treats it as a wound requiring acknowledgement. The resolution reads it as an ongoing schedule of extraction — uranium, oil, water, land, and now people — running continuously from the seizure of the Hills to the present, with no interruption to mark where history ends and current events begin.
Nobody protested this year
In 2020, when Trump last held fireworks here, Lakota organizers blocked the road to the monument with coup sticks, eagle feathers, and sage. About twenty people were arrested, Tilsen among them. He was charged with felony theft and robbery for taking a National Guard riot shield. The charges were later dropped.
In 2026 no protesters appeared. The National Guard and law enforcement patrolled a designated protest area on the highway leading out of Keystone — a fenced zone, some distance from the monument, where the First Amendment was permitted to occur. The memorial itself was closed to the public. Attendance ran through a lottery: 102,991 people applied, and roughly 4,800 were selected at random and admitted through the gates.
So the President delivered a speech about stolen land being a Marxist lie to an audience selected by drawing, inside a closed monument, on treaty land, behind a perimeter of soldiers, with a designated area available down the highway for anyone who wished to disagree at a distance. The absence of protest was reported as calm.
What the sentence is for
“As for those who peddle Marxist lies about our heritage, tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors, they’re doing something much worse than slandering our past. They are slandering and attacking our future.”
The claim that He Sapa was stolen is not a Marxist reading of American history, and it is not a claim that requires any theory at all to sustain. It is the finding of the Supreme Court of the United States, published in 1980, in an opinion that used the word dishonorable about its own government. The Lakota did not need the Court to tell them. But the Court told the country, and the country’s president stood on the mountain and called the finding a lie.
The word “Marxist” is doing specific work in that sentence. It relocates a treaty violation — a matter of signatures, of ratios, of an 1877 statute and a 1980 judgment — into the realm of ideology, where it can be argued about rather than counted. Three-quarters were required. Ten percent signed. There is no philosophy in those numbers. There is arithmetic, and there is a mountain, and there is a Council that voted thirteen to nothing and was told the matter was not negotiable.
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