EACH summer families drive from South Dakota's plains into the Black Hills, thick with ponderosa pines. The road winds upward, past the Putz 'n Glo mini-golf, through the town of Keystone, once home to miners and now to olde stores. Then around a bend they appear: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, each face some 60 feet (18 metres) high.

Inspiring, absurd, magnificent—however you describe Mount Rushmore, in its scale, ambition and subject it is uniquely American. But like many stories of the American West, this one has several sides. For many American Indians, it is a symbol of all the country has done to betray them. Now Gerard Baker is trying to give visitors from both sides a broader view. A towering man, with grey braids falling from either side of his ranger hat, Mr Baker is the first American Indian to be superintendent of Mount Rushmore.

The monument's history is a jumble of legend and fact. In 1923 a South Dakotan proposed a giant carving as a way to lure the new breed of car-borne tourists. Despite early criticism—one writer called the project “as incongruous and ridiculous as keeping a cow in the rotunda of the capitol building”—in 1927 Calvin Coolidge dedicated the carving, the New Englander wearing a ten-gallon hat to help him blend in. Mount Rushmore's sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, was equal parts idealist and egomaniac. But Mount Rushmore, finished in 1941, is an icon. In a busy year it can lure almost 3m people.

Beside these stories are darker ones. Borglum was linked to the Ku Klux Klan. And the history of the Black Hills sparks even more anger. A treaty in 1868 made the hills, which contain sites sacred to many Indian tribes, part of the Great Sioux Reservation. Whites simply ignored the treaty and poured in after General George Custer sent reports of the presence of gold by the panful in 1874. A century later, in 1980, the Supreme Court confirmed a $105m settlement for eight tribes, but the money remains largely untouched and efforts to reclaim the land continue. “The seizure of the hills was unconstitutional,” says Herbert Hoover, a professor emeritus at the University of South Dakota. “I just don't see any solution.”

Towering above this debate is Mount Rushmore. In 1948 a Lakota chief commissioned a vast carving of Crazy Horse, a famous Indian warrior. The project is still in progress some 15 miles away. But Mount Rushmore remains divisive. A tribute to America's “manifest destiny” to expand to the west is carved into land that Charmaine White Face, of Defenders of the Black Hills, calls “illegally occupied”.

This complex history is what lured Mr Baker. His goal, he says, is to nurture understanding and, one day, healing. Since coming to Mount Rushmore in 2004, he has stressed the importance of paying due attention to Borglum and the presidents. But he has also visited reservations to learn which tales tribes want to hear. Rushmore now has three teepees where Indians describe local traditions. The audio guide is offered in the Lakota language.

On any summer day thousands of visitors stroll through Rushmore, many licking ice-cream cones wrapped in paper American flags. Mr Baker hopes that when they leave, they will have learned a bit more “about Mount Rushmore, about the Black Hills, about what we call America”.