The Crazy Horse Memorial is a scam

The Crazy Horse Memorial, located near Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota, makes me sick.

The state of the monument in the background
The pipe dream in the foreground.

Leslie and I went to the Crazy Horse Memorial back in 1988. At that point, all you could see was a sketch of a horse in the rock. I thought: This looks like a pipe dream. But I also thought the project was something that the Lakota people wanted, and I was happy to support that dream, pipe or not.

So, I decided to go back last summer (with my brother Russ) and see the progress. And there is now a face carved on the mountain. An enormous face. It's not Crazy Horse, because there is no likeness of him in existence. In fact, he refused to be photographed. It's supposed to be a symbolic portrait of him (informed by people who described him back in the day.) There is also an enormous parking lot, a big building with Native American artifacts from many different tribes arranged haphazardly, a gift shop, a restaurant, and a "university."

The story told at the memorial is that a Lakota chief, Henry Standing Bear, asked sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, a Polish-American sculptor, if he would take on the project. He agreed and spent the rest of his life working on it. And I truly think that—while he wanted to go down in history as this heroic sculptor—he did in fact sacrifice and really believed that the USA was horrible in terms of Native Americans, and he wanted to help right that wrong.

But Ziolkowski died in 1982. His wife, Ruth, took over. The family had set up the Crazy Horse Foundation, and it was—and remains—in family control.  All ten of their children and two of their grandchildren have been sucking on this teat ever since.

This is the family getting rich off of the memorial.

Henry Standing Bear had made it clear in a letter to Ziolkowski that he wanted the Lakotas to be in control of anything related to the monument. That didn't happen, as neither Lakotas nor Native Americans in general have control, nor even a say in what the foundation does. All the high-ranking staff was white until this year. Due to pressure that was put to bear after this New Yorker expose came out in 2019, they finally appointed a Native American as the CEO this year, Whitney A. Rencountre

While there are some fans of the monument within the Indian nation, mostly it ranges from abhorrence to disgust to pain. The foundation is sitting on 95 million dollars in their coffers. The Lakota nation is poor. The only give-back to the Lakota a pittance of their yearly haul.

For instance, per their 2020 tax filing (990PF), the foundation took in $20 million in 2019, while they gave out in grants to organizations and individuals only $156, 216 (Part IX of the tax form). They compensated the Ziolowski family board members $526,730 (part VII). And, as mentioned before, all the other family members are also on the payroll, though not on the board. But that isn't the half of it!

The family wholly owns a private company, Korczak's Heritage, which runs the gift shop, the snack shop, the restaurant, and the bus to see the Crazy Horse sculpture up closer. Considering that between 1 - 1.5 million people go through the memorial a year, the family is both wealthy and set-up in perpetuity as long as people are suckered into going there, thinking that it helps and honors Native Americans.

There is a so-called university, which is, according to Brooke Garvis in her New Yorker expose, "a summer program, through which about three dozen students from tribal nations earn up to 12 hours of college credit each year. They also pay a fee for their room and board and spend twenty hours a week doing a ‘paid internship’ at the memorial—working at the gift shop, the restaurants, or the information desk."

By the way, after Korczak died, his widow decided to change the plan from working on the horse first to, instead, prioritizing the face. The face was completed in 1998. Since then, there has been no noticeable change. They have a crew of 3 that works on it when it isn't too hot or too cold/snowy or when there are no thunderstorms (and there are a lot of thunderstorms in the summer!). It will never be done. I read a geologist's report that it CAN never be done, as the rock is too soft for the final plan. So, they have an incentive to go as slowly as possible and keep raking in the dough.

The ridiculously long and self-fawning narrative of their explanation of how their profit-raising activities serve the public is truly nauseating. (See "additional data" after Part VII)

Jim Bradford, a Native who served in the State Senate summed it up for Brooke: “It kind of felt like it started out as a dedication to the Native American people,” he said. “But I think now it’s a business first. All of a sudden, one non-Indian family has become millionaires off our people.”

So, my advice is don't be suckered to pay out your $15-$35 per vehicle (depending on the time of year and the number of people). Instead, go to the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation and their visitor's center. Give them the money. Go check out the Wounded Knee Massacre site. Don't make the Ziolkowski's richer than they already are, please.