26 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
A monument to Native American history has become a lucrative tourist attraction.
LETTER FROMSOUTHDA KOTA
AMERICAN SPHINX
What does the Crazy Horse Memorial really stand for?BY BROOKEJARVIS
CHARLES BENNETT/AP
T
he 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 stat-
ues of all the former Presidents of the
United States, each just eerily shy of
life-size. On the corner of Mount Rush-
more Road and Main Street, a dimin-
utive Andrew Jackson scowls and crosses
his arms; on Ninth and Main, a shoul-
der-high Teddy Roosevelt strikes an
impressive pose, holding a petite sword.
As 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. Western expansion and settler
colonialism join in a jolly, jumbled fanta-
sia: 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 Mu-
seum, which sells a tank top featuring
a buff Abraham Lincoln above the slo-
gan “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 Jo-
seph, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and RedCloud and labels them “The Original
Founding Fathers,” and also one that
reads, in star-spangled letters, “Wel-
come to America Now Speak English.”
The source from which so much
strange Americana flows is Mt. Rush-
more, which, with the stately columns
and the Avenue of Flags leading up to
it, seems to leave the historical mess be-
hind. But perhaps we get that feeling
only because we’ve grown accustomed
to the idea of it: a monument to patri-
otism, 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 Presi-
dents who had policies to exterminate
the people into whose land the carving
was dynamited.
Past Mt. Rushmore is another moun-
tain, and another memorial. 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. After seventy-one years
of work, it is far from finished. All that
has emerged from Thunderhead Moun-
tain is an enormous face—a man of stone,
surveying the world before him with a
slight frown and a furrowed brow.
Decades 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. 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. It
will be the largest sculpture in the his-
tory of the world. Yet, to some of the
people it is meant to honor, the giant
emerging from the rock is not a memo-
rial but an indignity, the biggest and
strangest and crassest historical irony in
a region, and a nation, that is full of them.T
he monument is meant to depict
Tasunke Witko—best known as
Crazy Horse—the Oglala Lakota war-
rior famous for his role in the resound-
ing defeat of Custer and the Seventh
Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big-
horn and for his refusal to accept, even
in the face of violence and tactical star-
vation, the American government’s efforts
to confine his people on reservations. He