Crazy Horse Memorial

The lovely Robin and I were blessed last Sunday to pay a visit to the Crazy Horse Memorial, a massive sculpture being carved into Thunderhead Mountain on land considered sacred by some Oglala Lakota in the Black Hills of South Dakota. If it is ever finished (it has been in progress since 1948, when Henry Standing Bear, a Lakota elder, commissioned Korczak Ziolkowski to create it), it will depict Crazy Horse, an Oglala Lakota warrior, riding a horse and pointing into the distance. While millions of tons of rock have been blasted and moved from the mountain, the work proceeds slowly for lack of funding. Its completion is uncertain.

The grounds of the memorial includes the Indian Museum of North America and the Native American Cultural Center. We saw hoop dances performed there by an eighteen-year-old Lakota woman and her niece.

I could have spent days viewing the many amazing exhibits and artifacts in the museum, including a handwritten family tree of Crazy Horse. So much fascinating, beautiful, and heartbreaking stuff.

The Crazy Horse Memorial is roughly seventeen miles from Mount Rushmore.