Above the Missouri at the Chamberlain rest area stands a woman fifty feet tall, facing east, in a dress cut on the pattern of a two-hide Plains dress of the 1850s, holding a star quilt open behind her shoulders. The sculptor Dale Claude Lamphere, then South Dakota's artist laureate, made her for the Norm and Eunabel McKie family, who gave her to the state, and modeled her face on a composite of three Lakota women aged fourteen, twenty-nine and fifty-five. She was dedicated on September 17, 2016.
The quilt is the heart of it. Among the Lakota and Dakota a star quilt is given to honor someone, and Lamphere built this one of 128 stainless-steel diamonds in the blues of the river and the sky beside it, offset so that they tremble in the wind, which here rarely stops. The whole figure, some twelve tons of steel, was built in an isolated spot near the Cheyenne River and trucked more than two hundred miles east. At night it is lit.
She has also raised a question the sculptor took seriously: who gets to portray Native women, and for whom. In 2020 Lamphere paid for signs at the base that explain the Lakota meanings behind the dress and the quilt. Across the interstate in Chamberlain, the Akta Lakota Museum and the South Dakota Hall of Fame tell more of the stories she stands for.
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