After Mt. Rushmore, we drove about a half hour to the Crazy Horse monument, which is still under construction. In 1929, an elder of the Lakota tribe, Henry Standing Bear, wanted a monument to be built in response to Mt. Rushmore, to let "the white man...know that the red man has great heroes too." Henry Standing Bear chose a sculptor who had worked on Mt. Rushmore, Korczak Ziolkowski. (A Native Bostonian, by the by.) For a long time, Korczak did most of the work himself, with shoddy tools and limited funds, but he refused governmental intervention because he was nervous about how federal funding could possibly corrupt the vision of the memorial. While working, he met a young art enthusiast (18 years his junior) named Ruth Ross, who became his second wife, and had ten children with him. (TEN CHILDREN DAMN.) Korczak died in 1982, and his widow and some of his children have continued his work, Crazy Horse's face being completed in 1998. The work has been long and difficult, and when complete, it will be the largest monument in the world. You can see the outline of the horse drawn on the stone.Shockingly, I have a couple of wee problems with this business. So we watched an orientation video, in which we heard Korczak and members of his family talking about why they're doing this, and it's so "White man coming in to save the Red Man." SORRY WE KILLED YOU, BROS--BUT WE FABULOUS WHITE PEOPLE WILL MAKE YOU A MONUMENT AND IT'LL ALL BE COOL. JUST OUR WHITE MAN'S BURDEN, YO. It just squicked me out a little. I think the monument is important, and we should recognize not only the genocide perpetrated upon the native people, but also their stories and heroes, so maybe the white people should shut it and let the native folks speak for themselves? The Black Hills are sacred to the native folk, and they can teach us about that. It's important to remember why Henry Standing Bear commissioned this sculpture. Also, they're building a Native History Museum, and this is also awesome, but they're conflating all of the native peoples of North America. There are a lot of individual tribes there, kids, and while, again, we need to recognize these people, we need to do it in a less "broad sweeping generalization" way.
I do like that Crazy Horse will be way bigger than Mt. Rushmore, though.
Are they still planning to build a high school and all that other stuff? It's such an ambition project, and the family politics involved in it are very complicated.
ReplyDeleteIt's too bad you missed the Volksmarch, where tons of people walk up to the face.