"There are many Lakota who praise the memorial.... But others argue that a mountain-size sculpture is a singularly ill-chosen tribute. When Crazy Horse was alive..."

"... he was known for his humility, which is considered a key virtue in Lakota culture. He never dressed elaborately or allowed his picture to be taken. (He is said to have responded, 'Would you steal my shadow, too?') Before he died, he asked his family to bury him in an unmarked grave. There’s also the problem of the location. The Black Hills are known, in the Lakota language, as He Sapa or Paha Sapa—names that are sometimes translated as 'the heart of everything that is.'... Nick Tilsen, an Oglala who runs an activism collective in Rapid City, told me that Crazy Horse was 'a man who fought his entire life' to protect the Black Hills. 'To literally blow up a mountain on these sacred lands feels like a massive insult to what he actually stood for,' he said. In 2001, the Lakota activist Russell Means likened the project to 'carving up the mountain of Zion.' Charmaine White Face, a spokesperson for the Sioux Nation Treaty Council, called the memorial a disgrace. 'Many, many of us, especially those of us who are more traditional, totally abhor it,' she told me. 'It’s a sacrilege. It’s wrong.'"

From "Who Speaks for Crazy Horse?/The world’s largest monument is decades in the making and more than a little controversial" by Brooke Jarvis (in The New Yorker).

This is an excellent article about the twisted commercialism of the gigantic unfinished Crazy Horse monument, which is run by the Ziolkowski family and seems to work for tourists as some kind of antidote to Mount Rushmore.

I wanted to give this post the tag "humility," but I only have "humiliation" and "modesty." "Humiliation" is plainly wrong, but is "modesty" okay? Wikipedia's article "Modesty" says "This article is about body modesty. For the concept of modesty in a broader sense, see humility," so I'm going to go with the tag "modesty," and please understand that I mean it in the broader sense that Wikipedia treats at "Humility":
Humility is an outward expression of an appropriate inner, or self regard, and is contrasted with humiliation which is an imposition, often external, of shame upon a person. Humility may be misappropriated as ability to suffer humiliation through self-denouncements which in itself remains focused on self rather than low self-focus.

Humility, in various interpretations, is widely seen as a virtue which centers on low self-preoccupation, or unwillingness to put oneself forward, so it is in many religious and philosophical traditions, it contrasts with narcissism, hubris and other forms of pride and is an idealistic and rare intrinsic construct that has an extrinsic side.

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