30 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
income earned through Korczak’s Heri-
tage, Inc., a for-profit organization that
runs the gift shop, the restaurant, the
snack bar, and the bus to the sculpture.
To Sprague, who grew up on the
Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, mis-
direction about whom the memorial
benefitted seemed especially purposeful
when donors visited. “If there was money
coming,” he said, “I was at the table, and
Ruth was, like, ‘Donovin, where did you
grow up?’ It was just part of my job.”
(Ruth Ziolkowski died in 2014.) “Do-
nors were thinking they’re helping in
some way,” he said. “They weren’t.”
On Pine Ridge and in Rapid City, I
heard a number of Lakota say that the
memorial has become a tribute not to
Crazy Horse but to Ziolkowski and his
family; no verified photographs of Crazy
Horse exist, leading to persistent rumors
that the sculpture’s face was modelled on
Korczak himself. People told me repeat-
edly that the reason the carving has taken
so long is that stretching it out conve-
niently keeps the dollars flowing; some
simply gave a meaningful look and rubbed
their fingers together. In 2003, Seth Big
Crow, then a spokesperson for Crazy
Horse’s living relatives, gave an interview
to the Voice of America, and questioned
whether the sculpture’s commission had
given the Ziolkowskis a “free hand to try
to take over the name and make money
off it as long as they’re alive.” Jim Brad-
ford, a Native who served in the South
Dakota State Senate and worked at the
memorial for many years, tearing tickets
or taking money at the entry gate, de-
scribed himself as a friend of the Ziol-
kowski family and told me that he’d
sought advice from other tribal members
about what he should say to me. “It kind
of felt like it started out as a dedication
to the Native American people,” he said.
“But I think now it’s a business first. All
of a sudden, one non-Indian family has
become millionaires off our people.”
In 2008, Sprague, who had long lob-
bied for the memorial to use the more
widely accepted death date for Crazy
Horse, again found himself at odds with
the memorial. The museum had ac-
quired a metal knife that it believed had
belonged to Crazy Horse. Sprague ar-
gued that details of the craftsmanship
suggested that the knife was made well
after Crazy Horse’s death. He aired his
concerns to the Rapid City Journal, and
was summoned to a meeting at the me-
morial. “All it was was to pressure me
about changing my story about that
knife,” he told me. About a year and a
half later, he was fired. ( Jadwiga Ziol-kowski said that she couldn’t comment
on personnel matters.)
When I met Don Red Thunder, a
descendant of Crazy Horse, at his house,
on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reserva-
tion, he retrieved a cardboard box from
a bedroom. Inside, wrapped in cloth and
covered in sage, were knives made from
buffalo shoulder bone. Each was la-
belled: “Sitting Bull,” “Touch the
Clouds,” “Little Crow,” “High Back
Bone,” and, finally, “Crazy Horse.” They
had, he claimed, been repatriated to the
family from the Smithsonian. “That’s
how we know that knife up at Crazy
Horse Memorial isn’t his,” he said. (The
Smithsonian was not able to locate any
records of this transaction.)
The memorial’s knife remains on dis-
play, next to a thirty-eight-page binder
of documents asserting its provenance.
Ziolkowski told me that she’s confident
it is authentic. She also said, “Sometimes
there’s nothing wrong with just believ-
ing. You don’t have to have every ‘t’ crossed
and every ‘i’ dotted.”T
o non-Natives, the name Crazy
Horse may now be more widely
associated with a particular kind of nos-
talgia for an imagined history of the
Wild West than with the real man who
bore it. “In the United States,” a judge
noted in a 2016 opinion in a case in-
volving a dispute between a strip club
and a consulting company, both named
Crazy Horse, “individuals and corpo-
rations have used the ‘Crazy Horse’
brand for motorcycle gear, whiskey, rifles,
and, of course, strip and exotic dance
clubs. Since at least the 1970s, Crazy
Horse nightclubs have opened every-
where from Anchorage, Alaska to Pom-
pano Beach, Florida.” In 2001, a liquor
company resolved an eight-year dispute
over its Crazy Horse Malt Liquor (Crazy
Horse the person deplored alcohol and
its effect on tribes) by offering a public
apology, plus blankets, horses, tobacco,
and braided sweetgrass.
When I asked Jadwiga Ziolkowski
about the concern that outsiders were
profiting from Crazy Horse’s image, she
replied, “We are very conscious of that,”
and then continued, “And we have the
image of Crazy Horse copyrighted, so
it can’t be sold by anyone but us.” This,
she explained, was a matter of protect-
ing his legacy; the memorial would not“We have a favor to ask.”