Lakota people do not like Mount Rushmore and have often seen the monument as an expression of the dominant culture's arrogance toward them. John Lame Deer, a Lakota medicine man, put it this way: whites, he said, "could just as well have carved this mountain into a huge cavalry boot standing on a dead Indian." But despite the apparent permanence of Mount Rushmore, Lakotas do not see the United States' ownership of the Black Hills as a settled fact. Indeed, most Lakotas hope to someday regain [sic] at least some of the land they have lost.
(Jeffrey Ostler, The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground, The Penguin Library of American Indian History, ed. Colin G. Calloway [New York: Viking, 2010], xiv [endnote omitted])
