South Dakota

We got back from Mexico late on a Sunday night and I was back at the airport early the next Tuesday for a trip to South Dakota for a journalism conference.

A couple of pictures:

Crazy Horse Monument, where a bunch of journalists gather for three days every April to work with Native high school kids, to show them what's possible and why it matters.

A scale model of what the mountain will look like when it's finished.

There's a wonderful saying at Crazy Horse, which captures the essence of the work on the mountain and the work with the students: "When the legends die, the dreams end. And when the dreams end, there is no more greatness."

Mount Rushmore is just down the road from Crazy Horse, also in the Lakota's sacred Black Hills. Construction of Rushmore prompted Chief Henry Standing Bear to ask Korczak Ziolkowski to come to the Black Hills and build a monument that honored Natives.
"My fellow chiefs and I," he said in 1939, "would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too."