Monuments and National Identity

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Monuments and National Identity
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Purposes of Monuments

• Commemorate events
• Honor individuals / groups
• Serve a sense of collective identity
• Instill a sense of national pride

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Quote

• Commemorative activity is by definition social
  and political, for it involves the coordination
  of individual and group memories, whose results
  may appear consensual when they are in fact the
  product of processes of intense contest,
  struggle, and in some instances, annihilation.
• Commemorations The Politics of National
  Identity
• By John Gillis

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Sculptor Gutzon Borglum

• American citizen / artist
• Commissioned in 1929
• Borglum known for creating artwork that conveyed
  Western conquest
• He became prominent in elite political circles

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Borglums Views of White Supremacy

• The Nordic races have been and continue today the
  pioneers of the world. They are the builders of
  world empire - - - it may safely be said that all
  invention, analytical science, deductive
  philosophy have been pushed forward by these
  venturesome people, who have subdued savages,
  beautified and peopled what was once a
  wilderness
• From unpublished article written during KKK
  membership periodquoted in Mount Rushmore by
  Jesse Larner

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Borglums Reasons for Creating the Monument

• Too little has been written, on the wide freedoms
  secured, the virgin worlds offered -- unpeopled,
  untilled, ungoverned -- the nomads incapable of
  resisting . . . No one has sung, painted, or
  carved adequately the story of this irresistible
  God-man movement that fled its ancient moorings .
  . . Following the sun into the unknown west!
• San Francisco Examiner, 1934quoted in Mount
  Rushmore by Jesse Larner

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Challenges to the Monument

• Desecrates landscape
• Invades Lakota Territory violates treaty
• Black Hills considered sacred ground- Indian
  view of human relationship to land
• Commodifies the land

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Devils Tower Eastern Wyoming
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