Hill City, South Dakota

We visited the Crazy Horse Memorial yesterday.

The sculpture has been under construction since 1948 and will be a massive 641 feet wide by 563 feet high when it is completed. Not only is it huge, it is three dimensional and will be sculpted on both sides.

The work is an amazing undertaking. Korzcak Ziolkowski worked on Mount Rushmore and was asked by Chief Henry Standing Bear, a Lakota Indian elder, to design and carve a sculpture because he and his fellow chiefs “would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too.”

Ziolkowski was 40 years old when he started the sculpture. He made the decision that the undertaking would be not be government funded and started a private non-profit organization.

He had a vision that the sculpture would serve as a part of a combination of museum, cultural center, and Native American university.

Ziolkowski and his second wife had ten children, and most of them work for the non-profit and live on the foundation’s land.

The most often asked visitor question is, “When will it be finished?”

To get an idea of the sheer size of the piece, all four presidents’ heads from Rushmore would fit inside of the Crazy Horse sculpture’s head.

There is no time table,  but given that it’s been under construction for almost 70 years, my guess is that it’s at least that far away…

There is a lot of controversy about both the sculpture and the non-profit. Some Native Americans disagree with not only the sculpture, but the placement of it on sacred land. Descendants of Crazy Horse were not asked about the project before it was begun. Many object to the distribution of monies made from tourists visiting the site to find other projects besides the sculpture.

As I marveled at the undertaking, I wondered if anyone else was pondering the same thoughts I was: Would a smaller sculpture have served the same purpose? Maybe one that could have been completed in 75 years instead of at least 150…