The place that the Crazy Horse Memorial now depicts — the mountain above Custer, South Dakota — is in the Black Hills.

Whether his burial was in the Black Hills, near them, or at a distance from them is not established.

But the cultural geography of the Black Hills is the context within which the Lakota understanding of where he might appropriately rest would have been formed.

The ongoing dispute between the Lakota and the United States government over the Black Hills — a dispute that has never been legally resolved in a way that satisfies the Lakota’s understanding of their rights — is itself connected to the burial mystery.

Both involve the question of whose authority governs the landscape and whose definition of what matters shapes what happens to it.