The Lakota, Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Memorials::

Crazy Horse Memorial and Sacred Space

"You do not sell the land upon which the people walk. This is the land where my people are buried" (Words attributed to Crazy Horse).

Another memorial, being built some twenty-five miles south of Mt Rushmore, presents an altogether more complex story for the Lakota. Dubbed by many as the 'fifth granite face in the Black Hills', the Crazy Horse Memorial was begun at the request of a respected leader of the Oglala Lakota tribe, in 1947, and has since received mixed reactions form the Lakota, even though it is still a long way off from being completed.

Crazy Horse is a brooding presence, looming up out of the ponderosa pine, his face slowly animating rigid granite stone, staring out towards the prairie. Eventually he will have his arm outstretched, his finger pointing to the lands that were once claimed by this people - lands he fought hard and lost his life for. Not, yet, surrounded by the tourist razzmatazz that has ensnared Mt Rushmore, the figure of the great Lakota warrior makes for an poignant, if eerie, reminder of recent Sioux history. For many it serves as a sobering counterpoint to the bombastic Shrine of (American) Democracy.

The man who initiated the project, Henry Standing Bear, wrote to a sculptor from Boston requesting that the great Lakota warrior and hero be commemorated in stone so that "the white man [will] know [that] the red man has great heroes too" (1939). There is dispute as to whether Standing Bear wanted the image of Crazy Horse to be so entrenched in stone and at such large a scale, but Korczak Ziolkowski accepted the invitation in 1947 and work began the next year on blasting through Thunderhead Mountain. In the early 1950s, the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation acquired the area outright, through a land exchange with the federal government.

Today only the head has been completed and that alone is larger than the four presidents combined on Mt Rushmore. The Memorial is not a federal project and subsists on private donations and by charging up to fifteen dollars per car load of visitors at a time. It is estimated that it will be completed around 2050 and will be the world's largest stone work. The Memorial attracts a good million visitors a year, and, at the times I have been there, far more Indian visitors than Mt Rushmore. The Lakota story is told in great detail throughout the complex, but doubts have been expressed as to whether the Memorial is really a celebration in rock of a Lakota hero, or another example of desecration of the Lakota homeland.

Lakota reaction to the Memorial is mixed. An Oglala activist is adamant that the Memorial is a desecration. She asks,

"How can man even conceive of building something on land that is sacred? How can man ever build something more beautiful or sacred than what God has created? […] This is the very land that Crazy Horse was fighting for. Instead of desecrating what he considered sacred land, and blowing up mountains in a total violation of the beliefs that he held, if the Ziolkowskis wanted to honor him, why don't they try to have the land returned to Crazy Horse's people?" (White Face, Rapid City Journal 1998).

Oglala editor of Indian Country Today, Tim Giago, has wondered whom the Memorial is honouring: the great warrior or Ziolkowski. Certainly the Bostonian sculptor's life is amply displayed and venerated throughout the museum. Giago stated his objections to the Memorial in a hotly-worded editorial. Using analogy that is commonly used by Lakota involved in the land claim, he compared the Memorial to a defilement of Mecca, the Holy Land, or the Vatican; a desecration of sacred land; and a great dishonour to a man who would never have consented to have had his face carved on sacred stone. He quotes Oglala elder, Oliver Red Cloud, as saying that he believes that the Memorial will never be completed because Wakantanka will not allow it; Lakota anthropologist and elder, Beatrice Medicine, calling the carving "a sacrilege that mars the beauty of the sacred Black Hills"; and a fellow Indian Country Today editor calling the carving "a monument of exploitation" (Indian Country Today 1998).

Many Lakota agree with him. One man at the Memorial told me: "He [Crazy Horse] didn't maintain his freedom for this - to be stuck on up there on a mountain. […] We don't even know where he's buried!" (1998). Some expressed the view that Crazy Horse would turn in his grave if he knew he was carved into the very Hills he strove to defend. No one, they said, has the right to carve into sacred rock but Wakantanka. No one has the right to remove the Black Hills, tonne by tonne. Furthermore, Inyan (Rock) initiated all creation from the heart of the Hills, and cutting into rock is like cutting into the source of life. The Hills as a whole shouldn't be 'messed with' because of the power it contains that cannot be conceived.

There is disgust in some quarters at the thought that the esteemed Lakota hero has been appropriated by non-Lakotas and is being immortalised on stolen land. A woman expressed her sadness that the Memorial has "pinned down" a man who refused to be pinned down. She observed how odd it felt to her that the sculpture memorialises an image "of a man who refused to be photographed!" (1998). Another response has been that the Memorial is nothing more than a tourist trap that is fleecing Lakota culture. Certainly there is the danger that it atrophies Lakota culture and presents to non-Indians the view that the Lakota culture remains firmly in the past - fossilised in stone. Memorialisation seems to encompass the Lakota as a whole as well as Crazy Horse.

There are others, however, for whom the Memorial is a great honour to Indian people. And because it will last 'forever', so will Indian history, they say. It is a great tribute to a great warrior who never sold out to the Americans and that it is a dramatic reminder of whose land the Black Hills is. The latter view was expressed by Oglala and ex-Olympic athlete Billy Mills, who gave an address at the 50th Anniversary of the Memorial in the summer of 1998. It went further, he said: Crazy Horse is a mentor to many Lakota people, and his effigy reminds them of their cultural pride. For some, Crazy Horse, and therefore the carving, represents nationalism and the struggle for sovereignty.

It is hoped that some time in the future, certainly after the sculpture has been completed around 2050, the memorial will serve contemporary Lakota people. There are plans to build a university for Indians, a cultural center and a medical center. Scholarships have already been presented to young Lakota for educational purposes. For those who support the Memorial, or whose opinion of it is not so equivocal, the carving may have been an unfortunate an act of desecration upon the Black Hills, but it has happened and there is nothing on can do but move on and make sure that the Memorial truly respects and encourages Lakota culture today.

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