The Presidents carrved into the rock are not themselves symbols of past atrocities committed against Native Americans. They are just images of Presidents known for other things. Most of them had nothing to do with what happened to Native Americans, right? To be honest, its late and I am struggling to remember which four Presidents are depicted.
In any event, that's a very different scenario than a flag specifically developed for military units fighting on the pro-slavery side of a war about slavery that mostly crops up again to endorse racist policies like segregation and such every so often . There wasn't like 200 or 250 years where there was a country called the Confederacy that did a variety of things good and bad. The Southern states have mostly historically been represented by the United States flag and the state flags of each state, historically. In fact, the flag in my avatar is one that was flying over Fort Sumter in South Carolina when rebels fired on it and ignited the Civil War, and the Union never removed the stars representing each if the states that tried to leave, to symbolize that we were one nation, indivisible.
It's the 4th of July, let's celebrate the country that the south has been part of from 1776 to the present, along with the north, and the good things that happened in that time for all Americans, instead of trying to somehow redeem a symbol like the Confederate flag that has had little historical presence apart from in connection with slavery, segregation, and other racist practices.
Well, Thomas Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase, buying land that never legally belonged to France or its predecessor Spain. It legally belonged to Native Americans, it just so happens that Europeans rode up in their boats and said "this is mine now".
Jefferson was the creator of the "civilization program", a racist and ethnocentric policy where the United States would loan many trade goods to Native Americans and force the natives into debt. Once the natives were in debt they would have no choice but to sell their land to Jefferson. Jefferson could then begin"civilizing" them.
Washington also had a Native American "civilizing" policy, though at least he tried to protect Native Americans from his war hawk friends in the Continental Congress.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now on to good old Abraham Lincoln, one of the most beloved people in American history. Lincoln sent General John Pope to conquer a starving band of Sioux (you know the same group that lived in the Black hills, and had their holy site desecrated) who were owed money by the U.S. government and needed the payment to buy food. Lincoln did not like the fact that the Sioux were demanding their money, so he told General Pope to wipe them out. His exacts words were:
"
It is my purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux. Destroy everything belonging to them and force them out of the plains, unless, as I suggest, you can capture them. They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromises can be made." (Dunkerley, 2000)
Lincoln did capture many of them, and then he had them executed. Lincoln had 38 natives hung at the same time, in what is the largest mass hanging in U.S. history.
Of course, it does not end there. Lincoln also ordered the invasion of Navajo land, where soldiers raped and pillaged the land.
If you want to read about Teddy Roosevelt, here is a non academic source:
http://nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/1093
Or you can check out Chapter 4 of
Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race by Thomas Dyer.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If anything, a giant statue of white men carved into the side of an important Native American cultural site is worse than the Confederate flag. Especially when you take into account that the men on the statue were not exactly good buddies with the greater Native American community. Lincoln, the man that butchered the Sioux, has his face on their mountain...that alone should be more offensive then a flag.
This to me is just evidence of how little Americans know about their own history. Everybody is banding up to ban the Confederate flag, and any media that depicts it. Yet because Mount Rushmore is a symbol of the United States (not the Confederacy), it is "ok", even if it does represent the conquering and genocide of a people.
