"I will return to you in stone."
– Crazy Horse, prediction made before his death, confirmed by his friend Black Elk
The Crazy Horse Memorial was something that I first heard about many years ago. I think that it was a report from a news program, and the one that keeps coming to mind is CBS Sunday Morning. However, I just cannot fully remember.
In any case, I had always wanted to see this monument ever since that report. In fact, I wanted to see it more than Mount Rushmore, frankly.
That runs contrary to the way most Americans seem to feel. Yet to me, if anyone should be immortalized on a mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota, frankly, it really should be a Native American.
However, a part of me felt that this, like Mount Rushmore, could be said to be defacing an entire mountainside. So was it right of me to get excited even a little bit, when this seemed to be a clear case of a beautiful natural part of the world - and the Black Hills of South Dakota are definitely beautiful beyond any doubt - being sacrificed to pay tribute to human beings?
Apparently, there is controversy surrounding this very question. Some Native Americans were for it. Indeed, it was begun by noted American sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, who turned down proposals for carving statues in Europe in order to devote his entire life to this project, which began in 1948.
It was a direct response by Native Americans, who looked with distaste towards the famous, and now iconic, Mount Rushmore monument which was carved out of a mountainside in the 1930's. Chief Henry Standing Bear saw this monument being completed, and, according to a 1997 New York Times article on the subject:
The Sioux leader wrote an appeal to a Connecticut sculptor who had worked on the monument: ''My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too.''
And so it began, with not just the approval, but serious enthusiasm by prominent Native American leaders:
The project began in the late 1940's. As five Sioux veterans of the Little Big Horn watched from the best seats, Mr. Ziolkowski set off the first dynamite charge.
Indeed, many Native Americans still are quite supportive of the project, and feel that it restores some long lost pride for America's indigenous population:
''I think it's pretty neat,'' said Alice Whitehorse Toncy, a Navajo artisan who was selling turquoise bracelets and earrings. ''All the Native Americans come in free. It makes you proud to be a Native American.''
Other Native Americans, however, are not as certain:
Some Indians question why a piece of nature is being blasted apart to create an image of a man.
''How can we tear up a mountain for a statue?'' asked John Yellow Bird Steele, president of the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council in Pine Ridge, about 100 miles east of here. He said that the council supported ''the overall concept'' but also noted, ''No one knows what Crazy Horse looked like because he would not allow anyone to photograph him.''
In the end, we went to both. Mount Rushmore is a very famous, even iconic, monument, and we were pretty close to it. And the Crazy Horse Memorial is also nearby. So we paid a relatively brief visit to Mount Rushmore, and then a bit of a longer one to the Crazy Horse Memorial.
Below are some links to the articles that I used in writing this particular blog entry and, below them, are the actual pictures which I took and am sharing here for this blog entry.
There are more, and I likely will try to get those published soon enough, as well.
For now, here are some of the pictures.
Enjoy!
Crazy Horse Is Rising In the Black Hills Again Share by James Brooke, June 29, 1997:
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/29/us/crazy-horse-is-rising-in-the-black-hills-again.html
The Slow Carving Of The Crazy Horse Monument by Charles Michael Ray, January 1, 2013:
https://www.npr.org/2013/01/01/167988928/the-slow-carving-of-the-crazy-horse-monument
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