Rushmore is complex in its own way, of course: a gleaming monument to the heroes of the American Republic, sunwashed by day and lit up in the twilight, that doubles as a darker monument to the Republic’s sins, set amid land held sacred by its native inhabitants that was promised to them by treaty and conquered unjustly soon thereafter.
Then there is the question of what the statue actually memorializes. Is it an answer to the white presidential faces just a short (if winding) drive away, a symbol of Native American resilience and power? That’s how it was envisioned by the Lakota elder who originally commissioned it, and the complex of tourist enticements around the mountain is presented as a shrine to Native culture and tradition.
But the monument also feels, at certain moments, more like a shrine to its presiding genius, the Polish-American sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski — a figure of undoubted brilliance and a certain megalomania who died in 1982 and was buried in the tomb he built for himself at the base of the mountain. This left the (privately funded) project in the hands of a foundation steeped in Ziolkowski family influence — which means that when you pay your entrance fee, it’s the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation that gets the revenue, and when you drop some money on Native American jewelry in the gift shop, you’re funding a for-profit entity called Korczak’s Heritage, Inc.
Which in turn is just a layer atop the more fundamental question of whether this way of celebrating Indigenous heroism actually does appropriate honor to Crazy Horse or the Lakota way of life. In a rich 2019 New Yorker article on the memorial and its critics, Brooke Jarvis quotes Indigenous voices on both sides. On the one hand, people who love the monument’s scale and brazen counterpoint to Rushmore, the claim it makes on American history. On the other, people who consider it sacrilege to carve up sacred geography to honor a warrior who in his own life declined to be photographed and who asked to be buried in an unmarked grave.
You could distill this controversy to a still-simpler question: For its 21st-century future, what kind of power does Indigenous America want? Is it power within America as we have known it — the power to keep Crazy Horse (and Sitting Bull and Red Cloud and Chief Joseph and Sacagawea …) on the same list of American heroes as the Rushmore presidents, the power to draw crowds that rival any other great American tourist attraction, the power to interweave the Native story with stories of colonists and immigrants, the way this week’s vision of the crowded Pilgrim table tries to do?
Or is it fundamentally a different kind of power, a power against America as we have known it — a power of resistance rather than competition or integration, Indigenous Peoples’ Day against Columbus and all the other European discoverers, sustainability against industrial capitalism and its discontents? Is the Indigenous answer to Mount Rushmore a statue of Crazy Horse emerging at a gallop from a mountain, or just the mountains themselves, sacred and untouched?
