What’s Native power?

Of all the striking monuments you might encounter while driving an overstuffed minivan west across the United States, few leave quite as intense and complex an impression as the Crazy Horse Memorial — the vast, unfinished carving of the Oglala Lakota warrior, whose face emerges as an 87-foot-high profile from the side of Thunderhead Mountain in the Black Hills, about 17 miles from Mount Rushmore.

Rushmore is complex in its own way, of course: a gleaming monument to the heroes of the American Republic, sun-washed by day and lit up in the twilight, that doubles as a darker monument to the Republic’s sins, set amid land held sacred by its native inhabitants that was promised to them by treaty and conquered unjustly soon thereafter.

But Rushmore’s duality still feels simpler than the layers of significance and controversy around the monument to Crazy Horse. The unfinishedness alone makes the project fascinating: At present, it’s mostly just the face, an immense profile looming above a terraced-looking rock formation that’s supposed to become a charging horse. Depending on your perspective, it can seem like a monument to persistent American ambition (in its final form, it will be one of the largest statues in the world) or a symbol of our national sclerosis (since Rushmore was completed in about a decade and a half, and the Crazy Horse Memorial began in 1948 and has no clear completion date).

Then there is the question of what the statue actually memorializes. Is it an answer to the white presidential faces just a short (if winding) drive away, a symbol of Native American resilience and power? That’s how it was envisioned by the Lakota elder who originally commissioned it, and the complex of tourist enticements around the mountain is presented as a shrine to Native culture and tradition.

But the monument also feels, at certain moments, more like a shrine to its presiding genius, Polish-American sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski — a figure of undoubted brilliance and a certain megalomania who died in 1982 and was buried in the tomb he built for himself at the base of the mountain. This left the (privately funded) project in the hands of a foundation steeped in Ziolkowski family influence — which means that when you pay your entrance fee, it’s the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation that gets the revenue, and when you drop some money on Native American jewelry in the gift shop, you’re funding a for-profit entity called Korczak’s Heritage, Inc.

Which in turn is just a layer atop the more fundamental question of whether this way of celebrating Indigenous heroism actually does appropriate honor to Crazy Horse or the Lakota way of life. In a rich 2019 New Yorker article on the memorial and its critics, Brooke Jarvis quotes Indigenous voices on both sides: on the one hand, people who love the monument’s scale and brazen counterpoint to Rushmore, the claim it makes on American history; on the other, people who consider it sacrilege to carve up sacred geography to honor a warrior who in his own life declined to be photographed and who asked to be buried in an unmarked grave.

Thus “Indigenous Continent,” the muchpraised new account of the long struggle for North America by Finnish-born historian Pekka Hamalainen, ends with a hint that Indigenous power will outlast the American experiment — “on an Indigenous time scale, the United States is a mere speck” — via “the primary Indian response to colonialism: resistance.”

A similar feeling attends a careful reading of Hamalainen’s “Indigenous Continent,” which labors to reclaim the great achievement of Native North America: the long centuries in which Native Americans were able to constrain, trammel and often defeat outright the expansionist European powers while building remarkable empires of their own.

In keeping with contemporary pieties, the book sometimes tends to moralize on behalf of Native Americans while celebrating even their most imperial achievements, contrasting their light-footprint empires with the white man’s heavy-handed colonialism. Given the violence with which, say, the Comanche enforced their rule, this can feel at times like an overcorrection, the mirror image of an older triumphalist, written-by-the-victors style of American history. (I recommend Peter Cozzens’ 2016 history “The Earth Is Weeping,” which focuses on the struggle for the American West, for an account that works harder to emphasize crimes and follies on both sides.)

But precisely by evoking that older style, with its canny empire builders and stalwart pioneers, Hamalainen ends up casting his Native protagonists in roles that are less exotic or premodern or anti-colonial and more familiarly American. His Indigenous characters are conquerors; traders; explorers; migrants; sometimes enemies of the Spanish, French or English and sometimes partners; full participants in the struggle for a continent rather than just martyrs to its conquest.

If you built a Native American monument based on his book alone, in other words, it might look a bit like Crazy Horse emerging from the mountainside at full gallop. And if you imagined a national holiday based on its story, it would be one that placed its Indigenous characters on equal footing with all their fellow Americans, sharing the same great continental drama — even the same table.

Here’s hoping you had a happy Thanksgiving.