Black Elk was a child at the time of Crazy Horse’s death, but his account was formed within a community that maintained memory of the events.

Neither He Dog nor Black Elk provided specific burial location information that has enabled confirmation of the site.

The 1960s-1970s: The American Indian Movement And Renewed Interest

The American Indian Movement, founded in 1968, drew on the legacy of figures like Crazy Horse explicitly.

The resistance of the Lakota leaders of the 1870s — Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Red Cloud — was part of the historical tapestry that AIM invoked in asserting Indigenous rights and Indigenous resistance against a governmental structure that was still, in the 1960s, implementing policies that were catastrophically affecting Native communities.

The occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 — in the area of the Pine Ridge Reservation, on the same land that had been the Lakota homeland in Crazy Horse’s time — connected the contemporary struggle to the historical one in explicit and deliberate ways.