Posted
on September 5, 2013
 |
In the foreground is the planned carving
of the Crazy Horse Memorial.
You can see in the background how much
has been carved in the first 65 years
of memorial-making! |
The
history of the interactions between Native Americans / Indians and
white colonists, settlers, pioneers, and armies, is long and complex,
with plenty of horrifying stories of massacres and broken promises
and diseases (sometimes deliberately inflicted) and battles.
People
on both sides did terrible things!
But of course we all knew which
side was decimated, which way of life was pretty much obliterated.
Today
we contemplate the story of just one Indian dying – but he was a
leader and hero to many.
Crazy
Horse was a leader of the Oglala Lakota people. He took up arms
against the U.S. government to fight against—well, so many things!
I have read that Crazy Horse was fighting against the theft of the
lands of his people. I have read that he was fighting against the
threats to his people's way of life. But I also read that he was
fighting against the U.S. because of a very specific massacre of
Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians. These groups were allies of the Lakota
Oglala and also the Minneconjou, and all four groups of Native
Americans banded together to fight their common enemy.
 |
| Little Big Horn |
Have
you heard of the Battle of Platte Bridge or the Battle of Red Buttes?
How about the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand, or the Wagon Box
Fight? Here's a battle you might have heard of: the Battle of Little
Big Horn. Crazy Horse helped to defeat George Custer at that famous
battle.
Despite
his victories, Crazy Horse was fighting a losing war. And he decided
to stop that war in order to protect his people. He went to Fort
Robinson in Nebraska to surrender.
There
are different accounts of Crazy Horse's death, so we are not sure
about exactly what happened. It seems clear that there were some
mistranslations and misunderstandings about what Crazy Horse had said
at various times. Whether the mistranslations were deliberate or not,
I couldn't say; however, the bad communications apprarently made some
of the white army officials and guards suspicious and fearful of
Crazy Horse. It may be that their suspicious, fearful treatment of
him made Crazy Horse fight back. Even though he had just turned
himself in, he may have been trying to escape, resisting arrest, or
at least resisting mistreatment. One Indian named Little Big Man
claims that Crazy Horse brandished two knives against the guards, and
that he ended up stabbing himself! In the back. With a deep-thrust
wound.
Yeah,
that doesn't sound very likely to me, either. Anyway, 16 other
eye-witnesses all claim that a guard stabbed Crazy Horse in the back
with a bayonet. Historians aren't sure of the name of the guard—just
as they aren't sure about much concerning this sad event.
This
summer I visited Fort Robinson, in Nebraska, and I saw the simple
memorial erected to Crazy Horse in the place where he was stabbed,
and the write-up about him in the little cabin where he died.
I
also saw the Crazy Huge memorial that is being carved out of a
mountain in South Dakota, near Mount Rushmore. The monument will show
Crazy Horse on his horse, pointing out over the lands that once
belonged to the Lakota Oglala. There is a story that a white man once
sarcastically asked Crazy Horse where all his lands were, now that
whites had taken them, and that Crazy Horse pointed out over his
ancestral lands and replied,
“My
lands are
where my dead
lie buried.”
The
Crazy Horse memorial is so interesting! It was begun in 1948 by a
Polish-American sculptor named Korczak Ziolkowski, at the request of
a Lakota elder named Henry Standing Bear. Ziolkowski started the
enormous project alone, but he ended up having ten kids, many of whom
helped out on the project—and today, with Ziolkowski gone, seven
out of the ten are still hard at work on the project their dad
started 65 years ago!
 |
The Crazy Horse Memorial is large!
Huge!
If it ever gets done, it will no doubt
be the biggest sculpture on Earth!
The nose alone is 27 feet long! |
Also
on this date:
Plan
Ahead!
