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SEQUENCE:19053123
CREATED:20250819T175100Z
DESCRIPTION:United Native Americans Celebrate The 55th Anniversary of The Mount 
 Rushmore Takeover  August 29th 
 2025\n\n\n\nhttps://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/august-29/native-americans-occupy-protest-mount-rushmore\n\n\n\nAround 
 dusk on the evening on August 29, 1970, a group of 23 Native American 
 activists climbs to the top of Mount Rushmore. Renaming the landmark Crazy 
 Horse Mountain, in honor of the Lakota Sioux leader who famously resisted 
 white Americans’ incursions into the area, the protesters are there to 
 reclaim land they believe to be rightfully theirs under the 1868 Treaty of 
 Fort Laramie, which guaranteed Indigenous people the right to all of 
 Western South Dakota. The occupation will last for two months, beginning a 
 new chapter in Native American activism.\n\n\n\nSigned at Fort Laramie in 
 the Wyoming Territory, the 1868 treaty was meant to end hostilities between 
 the United States and the Lakota people, Yanktonai Dakota and Arapaho 
 Nation. The treaty allocated the Black Hills and adjacent lands west of the 
 Missouri River—roughly half of what is now South Dakota—to Indigenous 
 peoples. But it tried to incentivize Native Americans to give up their 
 traditional way of life in favor of farming. And it was designed to 
 assimilate Native Americans into white American culture, with U.S. courts, 
 not tribal ones, given jurisdiction over the reservation.\n\n\n\nIn a sadly 
 predictable turn of events, the United States broke the treaty within a 
 decade. After George Armstrong Custer’s expedition found gold in the 
 Black Hills region in 1874, white prospectors and settlers rushed into the 
 region, leading to the Great Sioux War of 1876 and American occupation of 
 most of the land promised to the Lakota.\n\n\n\nNearly a century later, the 
 political and social fervor of the 1960s led to the birth of United Native 
 Americans, an activist group founded in San Francisco in 1968 with the 
 mission of fighting for the rights and welfare of Indigenous peoples. It 
 was members of this group that climbed 3,000 feet to the top of Mount 
 Rushmore on August 29, 1970. The site, a memorial to four American 
 presidents that symbolized the advance of white “civilization” into 
 lands considered sacred by the Natives who had lived there before, was an 
 obvious target for the activists.\n\n\n\nLehman Brightman, a UNA member and 
 professor at the University of California, Berkeley, chartered a bus for 
 him and his students after hearing about the protest and became a 
 spokesperson for the protesters there. “The federal government said this 
 land would belong to us as long as the grass grows and the water flows and 
 the sun shines,” he told one reporter. “Then they turned around and 
 took this land from us.”\n\n\n\nWith supporters running supplies up the 
 mountain, protesters continued the occupation until winter weather forced 
 them to withdraw in November. Throughout that time, the monument remained 
 open to tourists, although the occupiers draped a flag reading “Sioux 
 Indian Power” from the mountaintop and greeted visitors with protest 
 chants. Native Americans from around the country also visited during this 
 period, which Brightman said he hoped would be a “spark” for further 
 native activism. \n\n\n\nIndeed, protesters took to the mountain again the 
 following June in a brief action that led to 12 arrests. The activism of 
 the 1970s received new attention in the 2010s, when protests against the 
 construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline took place at the Standing Rock 
 Reservation, a remnant of the original Great Sioux Reservation established 
 in 1868.\n\n\nPlease Donate 
 \nhttps://cash.app/$QuanahBrightman?fbclid=IwY2xjawMRlGtleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETBsWVJmRFpCOWo2R0dpTEZzAR5n7VK1faMGo1JliUFw51Q2NlJCb19WHhBTm2t2m7Vm6IrWYIR6Xu112p4Nsg_aem_JuCSAqJjY76viTOhNYCtjg\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2025/08/19/18879087.php
SUMMARY:United Native Americans Celebrate The 55th Anniversary of The Mount Rushmore Takeover
LOCATION:https://www.facebook.com/events/1361607548790776/
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2025/08/19/18879087.php
DTSTART:20250829T200000Z
DTEND:20250829T210000Z
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