The Crazy Horse Memorial And The Question Of Representation

In 1948, the sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski began work on a massive monument to Crazy Horse in the Black Hills of South Dakota, in response to a request from Lakota leaders who wanted a monument to honor an Indigenous hero as the white-carved faces of the four presidents on Mount Rushmore stood nearby.

The Crazy Horse Memorial — still under construction as of this writing, the largest mountain carving in the world when complete — was intended to depict Crazy Horse on horseback, pointing toward the horizon.

The memorial raises questions that are distinct from the burial mystery but related to it: questions about representation, consent, and who has the authority to shape the memory of a person who left no photograph taken voluntarily, who actively avoided the cameras that other public figures of his era accepted as normal.