The Institutional Role of National Monuments N ational monuments are attempts to embody and justify ruling ideologies, often relying on the emotive powers of myth, the innate wonders of the natural landscape, and a bedrock of aesthetic conventions to communicate infinite domain over lands, peoples, and global resources.
T ake Mt. Rushmore, for example.
The never-completed monument was originally conceptualized as a vehicle for boosting the tourist trade in South Dakota. Built on sacred Lakota land in the aftermath of Wounded Knee, the Mt. Rushmore national monument tries to usurp the natural majesty of the Black Hills to make some distorted statement about US sovereignty over these colonized lands. The patriarchal 'father' of our country. Each of the presidents' heads represented a national milestone in the US's short and imperialist history. T he canyon that's home to Mt. Rushmore was also supposed to house a great Hall of Records.