Article: Crazy Horse family protests club

[Phil in Paris]

By CARSON WALKER / The Associated Press

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — Descendants of the storied Native warrior Crazy Horse want an upscale Paris strip club to stop using his name, saying it's disrespectful to him and his offspring.

Crazy Horse Paris was established in 1951 and is well-known for adult entertainment similar to that featured at casinos in Las Vegas. It's located near the Champs-Elysées, the Seine River and the Pont de l'Alma bridge, where Princess Diana was killed.

Crazy Horse was an Oglala Sioux warrior known for fighting the U.S. military in the 1800s. One of his descendants and an executor of his estate, Harvey White Woman, has written the club's owners, asking that they change the name.

He said the request was prompted by an HBO cable television special that featured the club and its dancers wearing what looked to be feathered headdresses, a revered native symbol.

"I saw the name and I said, ‘That's not right.' When you say the name Crazy Horse, you don't conjure up nightclubs. You conjure up the warrior," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Kyle, S.D., on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

White Woman said he decided to write the club before taking legal action, something Crazy Horse's descendants have done in the past.

In 1992, Hornell Brewing Co. of Brooklyn, N.Y., started bottling "The Original Crazy Horse Malt Liquor." The family sued and the case largely has been settled because the company agreed to stop using the name and to pay family members $150,000, White Woman said.

Another case involves Liz Claiborne's Crazy Horse line of clothing.

White Woman said the family was less likely to succeed in stopping the use of that brand because it's not directly tied to Native culture, as was the case with the beer — and apparently the nightclub.

Crazy Horse Paris is owned by the founder's three children, who did not want to comment, according to an e-mail from one of them, Sophie Bernardin.

But its Internet site offers a history of the club, its show style — dubbed "art of the nude dance" — and how the late Alain Bernardin came up with the idea for the show more than 50 years ago.

"Bernardin was fascinated by the America of the cowboy saloons and the myth of the Far West," the site states. "Bernardin wanted to do something different, based on the idea of an American style striptease."

White Woman said, "If it's being used as an attachment to the Native culture, then that's when we can get them."

His letter was delivered to the club's owners Saturday by Alfred Red Cloud, a descendant of another revered Oglala Sioux leader, Chief Red Cloud.

Alfred Red Cloud, who also lives on the Pine Ridge reservation, traveled to France on behalf of author and photographer Serle Chapman, whose book about Native culture, "We The People," is being released in a French edition.

As part of the release, Chapman was chosen as one of the United States' 50 most influential writers and invited to attend a major literary festival this week in Paris.

Chapman said he couldn't attend because of health reasons but sent Red Cloud in hopes of drawing attention to the issue of the nightclub name.

"Red Cloud and Crazy Horse are the two most significant names in Lakota history," he said in a telephone interview.

Crazy Horse "was totally committed to the traditional Lakota way. What they are doing is the antithesis of that, that if they had any understanding, you would hope they would see fit to change the name."

Red Cloud, who wrote a new introduction for the French edition of "We The People," said in a statement before he left South Dakota that he would "try and bring the Crazy Horse name home where it belongs."

In June 2001, as part of the club's 50th anniversary, it duplicated the club and its show at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The dancers are known as the Crazy Horse Dance Troupe, but the show is called La Femme.

"Direct from the original Crazy Horse in Paris," MGM's Web site touts.

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