Crazy Horse Memorial, SD: In Photos
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| About 16.5 miles south west of Mt Rushmore is the Crazy Horse Memorial |
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| In 1948, about 7 years after the completion of Mt Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Memorial was launched by sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski. Korczak worked on it for 36 years until his death in 1982. |
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| This is what the Crazy Horse Memorial is supposed to look like when finished. Since the death of the sculptor, the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation was set up to raise funds to continue work on the Memorial. |
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| Sash posing with a mock-up of the Memorial. To raise funds, the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation sells tour packages out to the base of the mountain, and will let you walk on the Memorial itself. |
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| Inside the museum at the Memorial |
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| I had Bison Stew with Indian Fry Bread at the restaurant inside the Crazy Horse Memorial museum. |
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| Entrance fee into the Memorial grounds is $5.00 per motorcycle, but if you drive a car it's $10.00 per person. |
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| Sash was fascinated with the Crazy Horse Museum due to her heritage as a Choctaw and Osage indian. |
Sash:
ReplyDeleteI liked the Crazy Horse Memorial much better than Mt Rushmore. I would have liked to spend more time there. Lots to see and to buy too . . .
bob
Riding the Wet Coast
I loved it there too Bob. We usually don't buy much of anything. Since we keep only what we need, I find I buy little now. If I buy something, I have to ditch something. I don't mind replacing things, but now we add nothing to our possessions. Because if we intend to ride a few years this way, whatever I would buy would just sit in a box somewhere for the next few years. And who knows? Maybe I won't even want it then!
DeleteI've always felt uneasily cynical about that thing. Firstly, it isn't of Crazy Horse. No one knows what Crazy Horse actually looks like, so this is an imagining. I'm not sure how I feel about that because in some small way it suggests all Native Americans are the same. It's akin to making a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. but just modelling it after the first good-looking black guy you find.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, Russell Means was against it. Whereas the largesse of the project seems like the sort of thing a Republic of Lakotah proponent would be all for. To me, though, the amount of pie-in-the-sky thinking that surrounds the site is deeply saddening. Because it will never happen.
They've been carving for 65 years and in all that time they've only managed an incomplete face -- of a bloke who's supposed to be sitting on a horse with a massive poem next to him. At this rate, the project will take hundreds and hundreds of years, by which time the rock will likely have eroded.
On top of this, are all the ridiculous additional plans for setting up a Native American medical university and an airport and football field and on and on. The scope is just so enormous and completely removed from reality that it makes me sad. I sit there and think: "This is the legacy you want? This is de-facto a monument to comedic failure."
Additionally, I'm not sure how I feel about the underlying intent and purpose of the whole thing. I mean, basically it was devised as a big "Fuck You" to Mount Rushmore. I can't say I'm all in favour of memorializing bitterness and anger (albeit well-founded).
But, as I say, I am uneasy in all this criticism because, you know, I'm not Native American.
Silly Indians! Things like universities, airports, and dreams are for white people!
DeleteThanks for the reality check Chris. I'll talk to Great Bear of the Pine Trees and remind them that only the round eyes can say "Fuck You" to a bunch of presidents.
Also, after being there, it seems to me that "it" has already happened. They seem to draw a nice crowd of paying tourists who drop money on food and trinkets that keeps the slow steady progress. For me, I found seeing just the face and the vision fulfilling. But you know us silly Indians thrive on visions!
Gee Chris. You're sounding quite Welsh, don't you think?
(I hope you can take this with the tongue-in-cheek humor it is intended to possess.)
I loved being there. For me, growing up an Indian in a white person's world, it was a touchstone for me, as well as a reminder that we haven't been wiped off the planet quite yet.
Smooches,
Sash
www.Sashmouth.com
In fairness to the Welsh, they would probably be all for this sort of thing. Wales was inhabited some 11,000 years before the arrival of the Germanic tribes and Normans that would become the English, so the Welsh see themselves as indiginous.
DeleteMy criticism of the thing is not that people are thinking big but that they are thinking way beyond reality. It's like a train that crosses the Atlantic or an elevator to space. If you had a Polish family out in the backwoods raising money for a space elevator but not really making any progress on the space elevator apart from setting up a space elevator museum and restaurant and countless loving tributes to their nutty patron who dreamed up a space elevator that wouldn't actually work because he had no training and therefore didn't understand certain engineering challenges, you'd think: "That there is something of a boondoggle."
To me, the Crazy Horse Memorial is a boondoggle. What's upsetting is that it is a boondoggle that wears the cloak of something that very much should exist. There should be greater recognition of Native Americans. Welsh is an indiginous language, remember -- I have quite a soft spot for indiginous peoples. And I think indiginous peoples help to define the true soul of a country. Because what is America? Miley Cyrus and Orange County Choppers? Or is it a spirit, a lasting and over-arching thing? I prefer to think it's the latter and that indiginous peoples are very much at the heart of it.
So, you have this boondoggle, and you have an incredibly good idea. Unfortunately, the two have mixed here and that's what makes me feel sad. Knowing it will never be completed and that it will become more and more of a joke to locals feels like a deep insult to Native Americans.
To me, at least. The round eye. But, you know, my ancestors were the ones handing out blankets*. So, perhaps it's wise not to put too much stock into my opinion.
*Not really. My ancestors would have been in Ireland at the time. But you get my point..
Chris,
DeleteLet me start with the fact that I love having this discussion with you. :)
You say that it will never be completed or that the progress is stalled is simply not true. Perhaps the enormous scope of all that is hoped for won't be completed, but the sculpture itself has made great progress. One of my favorite things they started doing are bus rides to the face, for a premium price, to stand nose to nose with the fabled Crazy Horse. (Yes, I know the sculpture is just a figment of someone's imagination, but hey, I'm cool with that, as an Indian.) These bus trips as well as helicopter trips are generating tons of money, as are the restaurant and enormous gift shop.
Being in marketing I know that the only way they are going to get it done is to market the damn thing and generate revenue. The sculpture progress is moving, at rather a nice pace I'm told, by the folks in the museum. Actually, swifter than it has in years. To me, that's success. Create an attraction good enough to sustain it's own progress.
You know, Mt. Rushmore was paid for entirely with U.S. Government funds. And it too, was never completed. Most people don't know that. It reached a point that the "officials" were pleased with and then funds dried up. The creator had much grander plans, but you don't learn about that until you go there.
I think many of us feel this way about things. We plan huge, have our experience, get real about things, then settle for what life hands us.
And I think you're wrong about us Indians. I don't know any who don't think that the effort at Crazy Horse isn't awesome. Part of the Indian way is to dream big and then just be happy with what we get. Indians are dreamers, but we aren't always doers. Just getting this much done is phenomenal for many Indians!
Oh, and I have and always will be Indian. Every time I spit "Native American" out of my mouth, I feel I'm betraying some part of me. Like I've been ethnically cleansed. I'm Choctaw and Osage and fucking proud of it. Most people assume we are lazy, uneducated, drunken heathens. For my part, I'm not lazy and I'm no longer drunk (sober 20 years) anymore. The rest, well, yes. But I'm cool with it. :)
Chris, I look forward to meeting you and Jenn. I look forward to arguing into the night about some point that will be meaningless by dawn. I look forward to riding together, all four of us, across Wales, as you tell me all about the boondogglery of the land. I'm going to keep thinking about it until it happens.
Call me a dreamer.
Sash