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

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.