This is what it's going to look like

After visiting Rushmore, I popped over to Crazy Horse, another granite mountain memorial in the Black Hills. It looks like it’s next door on a map, but it’s close to an hour of twisty roads away. Twisty roads are never a problem in a Miata :-)

Crazy Horse was begun in the 1940s by Korczak Ziolkowski, who earned his chops working on Rushmore with the Borglums. Korczak died in 1982, leaving his family behind to keep on carving.

The purpose of the memorial is to commemorate the “many great Indian men,” Crazy Horse being one of them, and becoming a spokesmodel for all. He is (or will be) pointing towards the Black Hills, land that was stolen from the tribes. The carving is only just begun, a real work in progress. The face is in, and some broad mapping of the horse’s head, but other than that, it looks like a strip-mined hill with a mask. It's destined to be huge, the four 60 foot heads of Rushmore fit in the space that Crazy Horse’s hair will take up.

It is a point of pride that the Crazy Horse foundation will accept no federal or state money, so it is entirely financed by the visitors who pay $10 to be offered a look at what is supposed to happen while being offered ample other merchandising opportunities.

The merch surrounding the Indian tribes bothers me. It is beginning to be so same-y that I honestly expect to find “Made in China” lurking on the underside. It’s the same stuff everywhere: feathers and (faux?) turquoise, dream catchers, baskets, leather widgets. I feel like the history of Indian heritage has gotten reduced to the merch version of a sound bite, and I’m not sure which side of us has pushed it there. Are they feeding us crap as an inside joke because we’ll pay too much for it anyway? Do they make crap because it’s what we demand via our purchasing power, and because we won’t pay for true artistry? Oh, and isn’t that an argument for all artists?

And so, having uncanned the merch worms, back to the memorial… In some ways it felt very much like a conversation I seem to have with a couple of students every semester at a critique. “This is what I’m going to do.” Well, then do it. Get it done. Bring me results, not reasons. As we say in quilting… it ain’t a quilt until it’s quilted, which means the final stitches are in. SHOW me.

I have a sense of urgency for getting Crazy Horse finished so that it can better tell a history that is getting lost in the gift stores, and before the land grab gets sanitized through politically correct lenses and emerges as a distorted view, like why the tea got thrown in the harbor in the first place. I get the pride in not wanting to take the money from the folks that stole the land, but really, wouldn’t that be more fun? To finance this huge, in-your-face-white-man, Rushmore-dwarfing memorial with someone else's cash would be quite poetic. And if we are being picky about the source of the cash, aren’t the reservations making a bundle on the gambling habits of the white man? Can’t they fund a little of their own history, or have they embraced corporate greed? Hmmm.