A Colonialist Celebration of National <Heritage>: Verbal, Visual, and Landscape Ideographs at Homestead National Monument of America

Abstract

This essay analyzes the Homestead National Monument of America in Beatrice, Nebraska, as a material and symbolic rhetoric organized by the political ideograph <heritage>. After establishing the diachronic use of <heritage> and analyzing its synchronic confrontations with other verbal, visual, and landscape-based ideographs at the monument, I argue the monument is a material discourse symptomatic of a privatizing and protecting ideology. Specifically, the monument's employment of <heritage> perpetuates an ideology that separates <heritage> from the colonialist actions of the U.S. Federal government, opening a discursive space for recognizing the persecution of American Indian Nations by the “public” government, while not exposing a visitor's “private” <heritage> to the ramifications of that colonialism.

Keywords:

• Homestead National Monument of America
• Ideographic Criticism
• Public Monuments
• Rhetorical Landscapes
• Space and Place

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Dr. Brian L. Ott and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, as well as Dr. Ron Lee and Scott Church for their comments and reflections on previous versions of this essay. A draft of this essay was presented at the 2010 meeting of the National Communication Association.

Notes

The bracket notations (i.e., < >) used throughout this essay when referring to <heritage> and other ideographs such as <freedom> and <independence> are common notations used to indicate the presence of a term as ideographic in nature (see its use in, for instance, Cloud, 1998, or Hayden, 2009).

Furthermore, within this quotation we find that the American Indian voice is interlaced with an early Christian ideology, stating that nature has taught the Native tribes that God has given them this land. This warrants private cultivation, settlement, and use of this land by the pioneers as this is the same ideology that motivated Manifest Destiny.

Indeed, the work of Halloran and Clark (2006) might be useful to such a venture. In a series of articles, chapters, or books (e.g., Clark, 2004; Halloran & Clark, 2006), the authors present the argument that American landscapes, particularly in the 19th century, constructed a sense of an American, collective identity that reaffirmed a sense of belonging to the nation. It is not too hard to imagine how this precedent for a landscape would come to have an ideographic function when being mobilized in political discourses as the citizens are being “conditioned” to the landscape and its ideological implications.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joshua Ewalt

Joshua Ewalt (MA, University of Nebraska–Lincoln) is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.