Laying Claim to Sacred Land

In 1938, as often before and after, Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, offered a reading of the significance of the four U.S. Presidents whose images were being carved into granite. He explained,

Jefferson appears on Mount Rushmore because he drew the Declaration of Independence; Washington, because he was the great presiding officer in shaping the Constitution; Lincoln, because it was Lincoln and no other than Lincoln, whose mind and heart, and finally life, determined that we should continue as a common family of states and in union forever. Roosevelt is joined with the others because he completed the dream of Columbus, opened the way to the East, [and] joined the waters of the great East and West seas. (Dean,* 56)

An entirely different view was offered in 1970 by Lehman Brightman, cofounder of United Native Americans. Brightman and others in his group had joined John Trudell, representing the United Tribes of Alcatraz, several members of the American Indian Movement, including Russell Means, and some Lakota elders for a protest at Mount Rushmore. The protest was planned as an assertion of the Sioux claim to the Paha Sapa, or Black Hills, as recognized in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Means reported his memories of Brightman's speech in his autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread (1995). According to Means,

Lee explained that George Washington had become famous as an Indian killer during the French and Indian War. He had risen quickly through the militia ranks by butchering Indian communities and burning the bones. ... Lee spoke of Thomas Jefferson, who more than once had proposed the annihilation of the Indian race to "cleanse" the Americas ... Abraham Lincoln ... signed an order to execute thirty-eight Indians for the so-called Great Sioux Uprising in Minnesota. ... Finally, Lee spoke about Teddy Roosevelt, the biggest thief ever to occupy the White House. Roosevelt violated scores of treaties, and illegally nationalized more Indian land than any president, before or since. (167-68)

There are many ever-changing variations of Borglum's celebratory tale, and of Brightman's iconoclastic narrative. Borglum's view reflects a tradition in historical scholarship, but which remains dominant in the histories consumed by tourists. Brightman's view, on the other hand, provokes memories not yet emergent in histories of the nation. These divergent views of the figures carved into Mount Rushmore express fundamental conflicts in the meanings of America as a nation.


*Robert J. Dean, Living Granite: the Story of Borglum and the Mount Rushmore Memorial (1949).

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Nothing New Here

What passes for thinking today is the old process of relating the unknown and unexpected to familiar categories of explanation which have been arranged on a symbolic basis by our educational experience. If an event does not relate to the categories we have committed to memory early in our youth, then it has no ultimate existence for us or it is forced into these categories and forgotten. Society is trapped between a world which it experiences and a world it has been taught to recognize. Never have so many foolish statements been sent abroad in search of true believers.
Vine Deloria, Jr., We Talk, You Listen (1970), 23.

What is remarkable about this piece of commonsense?

First, as I was remembering it while walking laps on an asphalt trail around a nearby city park, I thought I'd read it the previous evening in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). It took me a lap and a half to correct this error of recollection. I did not read it in Robert Pirsig's classic on Tuesday evening, but in Deloria's second book on Monday morning.

Pirsig has been sitting on the shelf for many years unread. In graduate school, my wife often told me that I should read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which she assigned to her English composition courses. I started it once a few years ago, perhaps twice, but other priorities interfered and the text went back on the shelf. Then, last week, one of my son's friends (a college sophomore) sent me a text asking about Phaedrus. I did not know the answer, so I started anew reading Zen on Sunday evening. This time, I'll get through the whole by dedicating to the task thirty minutes or so each evening.

Second, the notion of fixed categories that fail to account for observed phenomena tend to irritate dark horse politicians. I'm thinking in particular of John Waite who is running for Spokane City Council. He is one of several candidates hoping to unseat Nancy McLaughlin, who has raised more money than "all other candidates in every council district combined" (Pacific Northwest Inlander). This morning, Waite sent out through Facebook a rant against the Inlander article, stating:

You have done a great disservice to the 3rd district city council race in Spokane, and a disservice to me, a progressive independent running for office. Just because someone doesn't carry around their "progressive democrat" card doesn't mean that you cannot have progressive leanings. Neither does being a fiscal conservative stop you from being a social progressive. It just means that I actually think about how I can pay for government plans. The things I think are important are fiscal responsibility, fair and responsible budgets, social equality, a healthy social service structure (preventive services, healthcare and policing), an emphasis on "quality of life", and all of this built around a progressive tax structure (which we don't have). And to say that the 3rd district is some "conservative bastion" disregards all the non-republicans, non-conservatives who have suffered through 8 damaging years of conservative government. Maybe you need to take off your two-party system glasses, get out of the office and visit some of the neighborhoods you write about in your newspaper.
John Waite

Third, the construction of such categories is the integral to the business of college, but perhaps not of the "real University" as Phaedrus conceived it. Thinking and effective writing differs. The teaching of rhetoric in freshman composition classes, for instance, brings out this scene in Zen.

A student would always ask how the rule would apply in a certain special circumstance. Phaedrus would then have the choice of trying to fake through a made-up explanation of how it worked, or follow the selfless route and say what he really thought. And what he really thought was that the rule was pasted on to the writing after the writing was all done. It was post hoc, after the fact, instead of prior to the fact. And he became convinced that all the writers the students were suppossed to mimic wrote without rules, putting down whatever sounded right and changing it if it didn't. There were some who apparently wrote with calculating premeditation because that's the way their product looked. But that seemed to him to be a very poor way to look. It had a certain syrup, as Gertrude Stein once said, but it didn't pour. But how're you to teach something that isn't premeditated?
Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 156.

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Columbus: the Truth

Here's a video from YouTube:



When "their" appears as "they're," the author's close reading of texts seems less than credible. Even so, the allegations raise interesting questions.

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Food for Thought

The long view of history highlights some compression towards the present.

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Borges on Patriotism

From an essay published in 1946.

There is no end to the illusions of patriotism. In the first century of our era, Plutarch mocked those who declared that the Athenian moon is better than the Corinthian moon; Milton, in the seventeenth, observed that God is in the habit of revealing Himself first to His Englishmen; Fichte, at the beginning of the nineteenth, declared that to have character and to be German are obviously one and the same thing. Here in Argentina we are teeming with nationalists, driven, they claim, by the worthy or innocent resolve of the Argentine people. Yet they ignore the Argentine people; in their polemics they prefer to define them as a function of some external fact, the Spanish conquistadors, say, or an imaginary Catholic tradition, or "Saxon imperialism."
Jorge Luis Borges, "Our Poor Individualism," in Selected Non-Fictions, 309.

In the essay that follows, Borges explores Argentine individualism through other literary references, suggesting that the state is untrustworthy not only because Argentine governments are typically corrupt, but also because Argentine heroes are loners that quarrel with the group.

He concludes,

Nationalism seeks to captivate us with the vision of an infinitely tiresome State; this utopia, once established on earth, would have the providential virtue of making everyone yearn for, and finally build, its antithesis.
Borges, 310.

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