July 4th and who owns Mount Rushmore?

Here is the end of week reflection from my Environmental Challenges massive open online course on property rights https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/environmental-challenges-property-rights/9/steps/744098.

Some politicians can always be counted on to be a fountain head of material that can be used to illustrate points of academic interest. The current president of the United States of America is a particularly fertile source of inspiration.

July 4th is, for some people at least, regarded as ‘Independence Day’ in the US. There is a federal public holiday to commemorate the date in 1776 when thirteen British colonies of the eastern side of North America achieved self-governance. This year the US president chose to celebrate the event at Mount Rushmore in the state of South Dakota. Interestingly in the historical colonial ping-pong that took place at the time, South Dakota was under French control until 1762, when it was ceded to the Spanish, who gave it back to France in 1800, who sold it to the US in 1803. Property rights of vast regions where exchanged at the stroke of a pen in bargains that had little to do with the people who lived there.

The reason why the July 4th event at Mr Rushmore is of interest from a more local property rights perspective is that the area was granted in perpetuity to the Sioux people in the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. A treaty that was subsequently broken during a violent military operation against the indigenous people in order to secure the gold resources discovered in 1874; and which was subject of a US Supreme Court settlement in 1980 in favour of the Sioux. The settlement has not been accepted by the Sioux, even though it is now worth around $1 billion, because it is not money they want, but return of the land.

So when the president spoke of “the agitators, the looters, and people who, in many instances, have absolutely no clue what they are doing” whilst standing in Lakota country of the Black Hills of South Dakota, he was with supreme irony, referring directly to the US government and it’s aggressive historical looting of the very land he stood on.

There are three main points of academic interest raised by this example. Firstly, wilful ignorance and warping of the history of those dispossessed is commonplace. It is often said that ‘history is written by the victors’; they use their imaginations to conjure up whatever scenario suits them and try their best to burn books and erase memories. Secondly, money and land are not necessarily the same thing. There is a certain cultural construct in which land has a market-place monetary value and can be exchanged freely, but there are other stronger imperatives in which land has spiritual symbolism as a place of being. Thirdly, and this is related to both previous points, when land property rights change, they do so in perpetuity – or at least until the next round of the ‘Game of Thrones’ in which the victor takes all.