4 Dances Rec Area near Billings, Mont. vandalized with Nazi imagery
Bureau of Land Management claims sacred site desecration not an Archeological Resource Protection Act violation
Nazi imagery was carved into sacred Crow lands. Photo by Adria L. Jawort
Early Saturday afternoon on January 14 an anonymous source sent me screenshots from a white supremacist chat allegedly showing Andrew "Sal" Salacinski had carved a deep swastika and Nazi "SS" into sandstone alongside other white supremacist symbology.
He even took a selfie of himself doing a "white power" hand gesture in the exact area, and posted a few of these same pics on his Gab social media account listing him as belonging to the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement.
According to the Anti-Defamation League and FBI reports, in March of 2020 a radicalized NSM member died in a shootout with FBI agents after allegedly planning a car bomb attack to blow up a Missouri hospital in “an attempt to cause severe harm and mass casualties.” Salacinski includes pics of himself with a mask and swastika armband on in the streets of Missoula amongst dozens of other hateful images.
Salacinski showing off his cringe credentials.
After studying the background of Salacinski's selfie, I immediately knew the area was on the high bluffs of the Four Dances Recreational Area which, according to the National Park Service, is "designated a Special Recreation Management Area and an area of critical environmental concern".
I’d actually wandered around that same area a few months earlier to take photographs and do a brief write up about the sacred area named after well-known spiritual and military Apsaalooke (Crow) leader, Four Dances, who in 1830 fasted in that same area in 1830 and received a powerful vision. His fasting bed is said to still be visible in the area.
That same afternoon around 3 pm I went to investigate the damage first-hand, finding it exactly where I thought it’d be.
I took my own pictures to record the destruction, also noticing the words "We are everywhere" with a swastika behind that as well.
Immediately after reported the vandalism on a Twitter post, at 5:34 pm the pics I'd seen earlier appeared on another local Montana Nazi group page Salacinski is part of, the Big Sky Active Club. Included was a damning message bragging about about the vandalism, "BSAC went on a hike and etched our message in stone. Tribe up or die."
The BSAC is familiar with me as well, once posting my article about them with posts exclaiming, "tr–ny native seething" in regards to my identity as they aimed to make me, "Become who they fear."
(Note: I don't fear them. I just find their violent, bigoted, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ ideology ruinous to societies—not to mention beautiful Montana scenery—and thus I'll continue to speak out against their ilk if conservative politicians refuse to do so.)
Current Montana GOP Treasurer Derek Skees of Florida claims anti-fascists like myself are the real problem in Montana.
While some people tagged local the local Billings Police, I told them please delete those posts seeing as I didn't really want to speak with any of them. Plus, it wasn’t their jurisdiction anyway.
Nonetheless, someone did forward my information I presented online to a Bureau of Land Management person, and a couple of days later I was at their office presenting a mountain of evidence implicating Salacinski at the exact scene of the crime on public social media accounts.
Despite all this evidence, when I asked for a follow-up over a month later, incredulously the BLM had decided not to do anything because it wasn’t an Archeological Resource Protection Act violation.
I said well that means people can keep going up there and keep doing it–“it” being carving swastikas into the area. They insisted there was little they could do.
View from Four Dances. Photo by Adria L. Jawort
As cynical as it seems, all I could think was: the Bureau of Land Management and local law enforcement chooses to protect Nazi desecration and vandalism instead of protect sacred Indigenous lands.
Sounds about…right.
