Abstract
Paha Sapa (the Black Hills) is a small mountain range located in what are now the American states of South Dakota and Wyoming. The region is a major tourism destination, and its single largest and most iconic tourist attraction is the Mount Rushmore National Memorial – a large sculpture featuring four U.S. presidents’ faces carved into a granite cliff. Mount Rushmore is widely viewed as a cornerstone of American heritage, and most of Paha Sapa’s tourism celebrates the past two centuries of Euro-American settlement in the region. However, this limited focus neglects the vast majority of the region’s human history and diminishes its past and present significance to Native people as a place of spiritual guidance and inspiration.
In this research, I investigate the environmental history and cultures of Paha Sapa, from its earliest-known human inhabitants at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch to the present. I adopt the Cultures Framework (Stephenson, Barton, et al., 2015) to explore the norms, material culture, and practices of three distinct cultural periods that have existed throughout the human history of Paha Sapa: the Sacred Landscape (≈13,500 B.C.E – 1877 C.E.), the Frontier Settlement (1877 – 1945), and the Tourism & Recreational Area (1945 – present). My analyses of all three periods draw from anthropological, archaeological, and historical accounts, while my analysis of contemporary culture also draws from data from forty-five interviews undertaken during fieldwork in 2018. This novel application of the Cultures Framework to examine historical culture and cultural change identifies opposing interests vying for control of Paha Sapa’s future – some driven by compassion for people and place and others by anthropocentrism and social exclusion.
In the final chapters of this thesis, I present a comparative analysis of the cultures that have existed in the region throughout its history and discuss possible futures that hinge upon the decisions and actions of key stakeholders. I conclude with the assessment that Paha Sapa approaches a cultural crossroads, a point at which those who live within and visit the region may either embrace its ecocentric legacy or cement its more recent status as a stronghold of rugged individualism and white supremacy. The choices made at this critical moment – at this nexus of ideological convergence – will ultimately set the course for a future that remains, as yet, unwritten.