Poetry Presentation, fall 2004
LITR 5731:
Seminar in American Minority Literature
Poetry Presentation, fall 2004
Kristy Pawlak
“Crazy Horse Monument” by Peter Blue
Cloud
Some Background:
Crazy Horse
In our reading we’ve met Crazy Horse though Black Elk who was his second cousin. Black Elk’s account of Crazy Horse seems to be the one that is most credited as fact. I read several biographical sketches on the web and all seemed to recount almost exactly the account of Crazy Horse’s death as told by Black Elk.
Crazy Horse was great warrior and leader among the Lakota people. He gained even more power by marrying a Cherokee woman which allowed him to form powerful alliances to resist and fight the white man, in particular at the Battle of Little Big Horn.
Crazy Horse led his people’s resistance until he finally surrendered and was confined to a reservation. He left the reservation without permission to travel to take his sick wife to her parents. Assuming he was plotting an insurrection, the General had him arrested. Crazy Horse agreed to go peacefully, but upon realizing he was to be imprisoned, resisted and was killed by a soldier’s bayonet.
Crazy Horse
Monument
I’m passing around a couple photos of the monument which is located in the Black Hills near Mount Rushmore, an area sacred to the Lakota people. The white marble statue is the model for the on-going mountain carving which has been under construction since 1948. The artist, Korczak, met Chief Henry Standing Bear in 1940, who was instrumental in the location and initial design of the statue. He wanted the statue built because,
“My
fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great
heroes, too.”
-- Henry Standing Bear, 1939
The statue has been built
entirely from private donations, admission fees, and other tourism revenue;
Korczak established from the outset of the project that he would accept no
government funds because he believed in individual initiative and private
enterprise.
The statue was designed
with Crazy Horse pointing ahead defiantly as a result of his famous answer to a
white man’s question, “Where are your lands now?” To which he replied,
“My lands are where my dead lie buried.”
Finally, it is important
to note that the artist was careful to express the fact that since Crazy Horse
never allowed his likeness to be painted or photographed, the statue is meant to
be a representation of his spirit and that of his people, not an exact likeness.
With that background
let’s read the poem keeping in mind the following course objectives as we
read:
Objective 3b: That Native
Americans “defy the myth of the ‘vanishing Indian,’ instead choosing to
‘survive,” . . .
Objective 1c: “To
observe alternate identities and literary strategies developed by minority
cultures . . .”
Also keep in mind the
following quote from last week’s handouts: “Nor did they [Indians] consider
humans as having a radically different nature from the rest of earth’s
inhabitants . . .”
READ POEM
If you don’t mind, I’d like to very briefly point out
a few things—each pertaining to a discussion question, and then open them all
up for answers because I think they’ll overlap one another a bit.
When I get to the end, I’ll restate the questions so that we’ll
remember them.
1) The first eight lines are especially filled with metaphorical language using nature imagery and personification. Knowing that this poem was written by a Native American, to what extent does such imagery simply reflect the Native American’s closeness with nature and, as the quote from last week mentioned, the culture’s lack of a division between humans and the rest of nature? Or does it reflect a minority writer using the literary devices of the dominant culture to express himself?
2) The repeated stanza of the poem that begins “Crazy Horse rides the circle of his people’s sleep” provides an interesting tie to the dream imagery that we’ve been working with, not only because of the fact that he “rides the circle of his people’s sleep”, but also because it is different in tone than the rest of the poem. The first part seems almost nostalgic, the middle tragic, and the end defiant, but this part seems almost strangely hopeful. How does this tie in with Objective 3b?
3) Finally, Peter Blue Cloud, the author of the poem seems to end with a defiant tone. He recognizes the irony of erecting a statue of Crazy Horse who would never allow his likeness to be painted because of his belief that pictures and statues captured a portion of the subject’s spirit. He also seemed to sense a futility in a gesture of respect or tribute to a people that have been so wronged. Do you think that he feels that Chief Henry Standing Bear was “buying into” the white man’s culture by wanting a statue erected just like the heroes on Mount Rushmore? He seems to say they would have been better off fighting than allowing such a gesture. Does Peter Blue Cloud feel that the statue keeps Indians from observing “alternative identities” as stated on Objective 1c?