The specific mountain above Custer, South Dakota, that is being carved into his likeness was chosen for practical reasons related to the sculpture rather than for reasons of historical specificity.

The memorial’s relationship to the burial mystery is one of symbolic presence in the absence of specific knowledge: it places Crazy Horse in the Black Hills landscape in a way that is culturally coherent without being historically specific about where he actually is.

Whether this is a satisfying form of honoring his memory, or whether it is itself a kind of displacement — a monumental substitute for the actual resting place that the world cannot find — is a question that different people in the Lakota community have answered differently.

Some have embraced the memorial as a meaningful form of commemoration.