Consulting with the Sioux Tribal Councils
Once Gerard Baker was appointed Park Superintendent for the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in 2004, he began to immediately add his personal knowledge and past park administration experience to improving the memorial experience. Baker, a full-blooded Hidatsa-Mangan Native American with years of experience expanding and balancing Native American representations and awareness within the National Park Service sites, immediately began a program of outreach to the local Native American tribal elders to find ways to in which to begin the process of balancing the displays and information presented at Mount Rushmore to include more of the Native American side of the story. After three years of conversations with individuals and groups, on February 21st and 22nd, 2008, Gerard Baker invited several tribal elders to the first ever tribal council to be held on the park grounds of Mount Rushmore. (National Park Service)
The session was designed to be a way for the park rangers and staff to listen to the concerns and ideas of the tribal elders who gathered there. It was the first dialogue session of what promises to be regular interaction between the official park staff and Native American community and spiritual leaders. After hours of discussion, three main ideas were solidified as steps that the Mount Rushmore staff could consider as potential ways to include the Native American perspective instead of excluding it in favor of the Anglo-American rhetoric of nationalistic pride and veneration of manufactured patriotism. One simple idea was to include selective areas with American Indian translations on several signs. The distribution of pamphlets with accurate information about the Lakota culture and spirituality was also requested. As an attraction
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