“He lived a life that was devoted to protecting our people.” (“Sioux” originated from a word that was applied by outsiders-it might have meant “snake”-and many people prefer the names of the more specific nations: Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota, each of which is further divided into bands, such as the Oglala Lakota and the Mnicoujou Lakota.) There are many other famous Lakota leaders from Crazy Horse’s era, including Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, Spotted Elk, Touch the Clouds, and Old Chief Smoke. He is a beloved symbol for the Lakota today because “he never conceded to the white man,” Tatewin Means, who runs a community-development corporation on the Pine Ridge Reservation, about a hundred miles from the monument, explained to me. The monument is meant to depict Tasunke Witko-best known as Crazy Horse-the Oglala Lakota warrior famous for his role in the resounding defeat of Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and for his refusal to accept, even in the face of violence and tactical starvation, the American government’s efforts to confine his people on reservations.
HUMAN SITTING ON CLOUDS NATIVE AMERICAN FULL
Yet, to some of the people it is meant to honor, the giant emerging from the rock is not a memorial but an indignity, the biggest and strangest and crassest historical irony in a region, and a nation, that is full of them. It will be the largest sculpture in the history of the world. The scale will be mind-boggling: an over-all height nearly four times that of the Statue of Liberty the arm long enough to accommodate a line of semi trucks the horse’s ears the size of school buses, its nostrils carved twenty-five feet around and nine feet deep.
All that has emerged from Thunderhead Mountain is an enormous face-a man of stone, surveying the world before him with a slight frown and a furrowed brow.ĭecades from now, if and when the sculpture is completed, the man will be sitting astride a horse with a flowing mane, his left arm extended in front of him, pointing.
After seventy-one years of work, it is far from finished. This one is much larger: the Presidents’ heads, if they were stacked one on top of the other, would reach a little more than halfway up it. Rushmore is another mountain, and another memorial. But perhaps we get that feeling only because we’ve grown accustomed to the idea of it: a monument to patriotism, conceived as a colossal symbol of dominion over nature, sculpted by a man who had worked with the Ku Klux Klan, and composed of the heads of Presidents who had policies to exterminate the people into whose land the carving was dynamited. Rushmore, which, with the stately columns and the Avenue of Flags leading up to it, seems to leave the historical mess behind. The source from which so much strange Americana flows is Mt. Western expansion and settler colonialism join in a jolly, jumbled fantasia: visitors can tour a mine and pan for gold, visit Cowboy Gulch and a replica of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall (“Shoot a musket! Exit here!”), and stop by the National Presidential Wax Museum, which sells a tank top featuring a buff Abraham Lincoln above the slogan “Abolish Sleevery.” In a town named for George Armstrong Custer, an Army officer known for using Native women and children as human shields, tourist shops sell a T-shirt that shows Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and Red Cloud and labels them “The Original Founding Fathers,” and also one that reads, in star-spangled letters, “Welcome to America Now Speak English.” On the corner of Mount Rushmore Road and Main Street, a diminutive Andrew Jackson scowls and crosses his arms on Ninth and Main, a shoulder-high Teddy Roosevelt strikes an impressive pose, holding a petite sword.Īs one drives farther into the Black Hills-a region considered sacred by its original residents, who were displaced by settlers, loggers, and gold miners-the roadside attractions offer a vision of American history that grows only more uncanny. The street corners of downtown Rapid City, South Dakota, the gateway to the Black Hills and the self-proclaimed “most patriotic city in America,” are populated by bronze statues of all the former Presidents of the United States, each just eerily shy of life-size.
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