in the three wings of its Indian Museum
of North America®, a collection of eleven
thousand Native artifacts. There is art
and clothing and jewelry, and a tepee
where mannequins gather around a fake
fire. A young boy, perhaps nine years old,
bounced through the exhibit, shouting
to his mother, “Are all the Indians dead?
Did we kill all of them? I! Do! Not!
Know! Anything! About! Indians!”
Inside a theatre, people watched a
film on the history of the carving, which
included glowing testimonials from Na-
tive people and a biography of Henry
Standing Bear. The film quoted his let-
ter to Ziolkowski about wanting to show
that the red man had heroes, but it omit-
ted a letter in which he wrote that “this
is to be entirely an Indian project under
my direction.” (Standing Bear died five
years after the memorial’s inauguration.)
The previous version of the film, which
was updated last summer, devoted fifteen
and a half of its twenty minutes to the
Ziolkowski family and to the difficulty
of the carving process. It featured only
one Lakota speaker and surprisingly lit-
tle information about Crazy Horse him-
self. The film also informed visitors that
Crazy Horse died and Korczak Ziol-
kowski was born on the same date, Sep-
tember 6th, and that as a result “many
Native Americans believe this is an omen
that Korczak was destined to carve Crazy
Horse.” In the press, the family often
added, as Jadwiga Ziolkowski told me
in June and Ruth told the Chicago Tri-
bune in 2004, that “the Indians believe
Crazy Horse’s spirit roamed until it found
a suitable host—and that was Korczak.”
However, the historical consensus
is that Crazy Horse died on Septem -
ber 5th, not the sixth. And I didn’t meet
any Lakota who believed that the carving
was predestined. Lula Red Cloud, a sev-
enty-three-year-old descendant of Crazy
Horse’s contemporary Red Cloud, sup-
ports the memorial and has worked there
for twenty-three years. When I asked her
what she thought of the supposed coin-
cidence of dates, she laughed. “If I was
born close to Halloween, am I destined
to be a witch?” she said. Tatewin Means
told me, “The memorial’s on stolen land.
Of course they have to find ways to justify
it.” Every year, the memorial celebrates
September 6th with what it calls the
Crazy Horse and Korczak Night Blast.
An announcement over the P.A. sys-
tem alerted visitors that a renowned hoop
dancer named Starr Chief Eagle would
be giving a demonstration. As people
gathered, Chief Eagle introduced herself
in Lakota, then asked the crowd, “What
language was I speaking?” When some-
one yelled out, “Indian!,” she responded,
with a patient smile, that there are hun-
dreds of Native languages: “We have a
living, breathing culture. We’re not stuck
in time.” Later, Chief Eagle, who has
been performing at the memorial for six
years, told me that she’s grateful that the
place provides a platform to push back
against stereotypes. “People can come to
see us as human, not as fictional charac-
ters or past-tense people,” she said.
In a corner of the room was a pile of
rocks—pieces blown from the sacred
mountain—that visitors were encour-
aged to take home with them, for an ad-
ditional donation, as souvenirs. The ceil-
ing was hung with dozens of flags from
tribal nations around the country, creat-
ing an impression of support for the me-
morial. Most of the flags were collected
as a personal hobby by Donovin Sprague,
a Mnicoujou Lakota historian who is a
direct descendant of Crazy Horse’s uncle
Hump, and who was employed at the
memorial as the director of the Native
American Educational and Cultural Cen-
ter®, from 1996 to 2010. “I thought that,
culturally and historically, they could use
the help,” he told me. But, during histime at the memorial, Sprague sometimes
felt like a token presence—the organi-
zation had no other high-level Native
employees—to give the impression that
the memorial was connected to the mod-
ern Lakota tribes. “The tourists, they say,
‘This money is going to help your peo-
ple,’” he said. “Everybody that comes up
there thinks they’re on the reservation.”
Visitors to the memorial are assured
that their contributions support both
the museum and something called the
Indian University of North America®.
Despite its impressive name, the univer-
sity is currently a summer program,
through which about three dozen stu-
dents from tribal nations earn up to
twelve hours of college credit each year.
They also pay a fee for their room and
board and spend twenty hours a week
doing a “paid internship” at the memo-
rial—working at the gift shop, the res-
taurants, or the information desk.
Though the federal government twice
offered Korczak Ziolkowski millions of
dollars to fund the memorial, he decided
to rely on private donations, and retained
control of the project. Some of the do-
nations have turned out to be in the mil-
lions of dollars. In fiscal year 2018, the
Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation
brought in $12.5 million from admissions
and donations, and reported seventy-seven
million dollars in net assets. These pub-
licly reported numbers do not count the“Are you sure you don’t want it? Eleven doughnuts
is pretty much all my diet can handle.”