Now comes the voice of NDN Collective President Nick Tilsen, speaking in resistance and rejection of the planned presidential “independence celebration” on lands sacred to the Lakota.
Excepts from yesterday’s excellent Democracy Now interview below, with images relayed from the NDN website.
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A more detailed press release from the NDN Collective, on behalf of the Lakota, can be found here.
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In 2016, Mathew Shaer, writing in that noted organ of radical communism The Smithsonian Magazine, provided informative texture on white supremacist “artist” and rumored Klansman Gutzon Borglum:
Dedicated 75 years ago this month, Mount Rushmore was intended by its creator, Gutzon Borglum, to be a celebration of not only these four presidents but also the nation’s unprecedented greatness. “This colossus is our mark,” he wrote with typical bombast. Yet Borglum’s own sordid story shows that this beloved site is also a testament to the ego and ugly ambition that undergird even our best-known triumphs.
In 1914, Borglum was a sculptor in Connecticut of modest acclaim when he received an inquiry from the elderly president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, C. Helen Plane, about building a “shrine to the South” near Atlanta. When he first glimpsed “the virgin stone” of his canvas, a quartz hump called Stone Mountain, Borglum later recalled, “I saw the thing I had been dreaming of all my life.” He sketched out a vast sculpture of generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and was hired.
The son of polygamist Mormons from Idaho, Borglum had no ties to the Confederacy, but he had white supremacist leanings. In letters he fretted about a “mongrel horde” overrunning the “Nordic” purity of the West, and once said, “I would not trust an Indian, off-hand, 9 out of 10, where I would not trust a white man 1 out of 10.”
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Desperado Philosophy 