A White House-issued report says the country’s foremost museums have fallen into “radical, activist ideology,” in part for their portrayal of Native American history.
Titled “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” the 162-page report was released late on Saturday, July 4. It criticizes the Smithsonian Institution’s museums — the National Museum of American History and the National Museum of the American Indian — for portraying America’s founding as a “fundamentally oppressive and genocidal effort to take Native Americans’ land.”
While the report admonishes numerous exhibits that spotlight the role of historically disenfranchised peoples, including Native Americans, it offers no recommendations or guidance on remedying the supposed imbalance in the telling of the country’s history.
The report stems from Trump’s March 27, 2025, executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which directed a review of Smithsonian exhibits, educational programs, and policies.
Shannon O’Loughlin (Choctaw), Chief Executive and Attorney for the Association on American Indian Affairs, told Native News Online that the report toes the line of erasure
“This is not simply a debate about museums. It is a debate about whether the government should decide which facts Americans are permitted to learn and which histories are acceptable to remember. Native Peoples know what government-sponsored erasure looks like,” O’Loughlin said. “…History does not become more patriotic when it leaves Native Nations out. No government report—167 pages or 167,000—can rewrite the lived experiences of Native Peoples or erase the truth carried by our Nations, our Elders, our communities, and the historical record.”
Here are our biggest takeaways from the report.
Genocide Framing ‘Dissolves’ the Full Story, Report Argues
The report contends that portrayals of cruelty and genocide against Native peoples by the federal government “dissolve” the full story of America. It points to the National Museum of the American Indian’s “Nation to Nation” exhibit, an 8,000-square-foot interactive display that takes patrons through the history of treaty-making to contemporary legal battles to uphold the rights enshrined in them.
The report takes issue with the exhibit’s introductory video, which opens in part with the line “the rise of a new great nation at the sacrifice of hundreds of others” — a statement it claims paints the founding of America as a “fundamentally oppressive and genocidal effort to take Native Americans’ land and oppress their culture and peoples.” It argues that the displacement of Native peoples in the 1800s had multiple causes — agricultural expansion, Manifest Destiny, population growth — rather than a single narrative of intentional genocide.
It specifically points to Suzan Shown Harjo’s video, “The ‘Indian Problem.’” In the video, Harjo — who is Cheyenne and Muscogee (Creek), one of the exhibit’s curators and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama — states: “When you wrench people from their homelands, wasn’t that genocide? We don’t make the case that there was genocide. We know there was.”
The report also points to NMAH’s “Many Voices, One Nation” exhibit, which tells the story of America through the vast and various cultures that call it home. The exhibit explores the history of forced removal to make way for white settlers, the government’s seizure of Native land to give to immigrants for farming, and the pursuit of war with Mexico in 1846 to acquire western territory — details that the report says amount to an excessive emphasis on the idea that the U.S. was founded on stolen land.
Land Back Advocacy Draws Fire
The report claims that the National Museum of American History has denigrated white, male Christians and failed to credit their contributions to America’s story. The museum, it says, focuses on race in areas where it has “little to no historical relevance,” pointing to the institution’s support of “land back” advocacy. It also criticizes the museum’s education curriculum, “Becoming US,” for its focus on peoples, cultures and languages that existed in North America long before the founding of the United States, and for featuring an article by Puawai Cairns (Māori), a prominent decolonization advocate.
The report criticizes Smithsonian Under Secretary for Education Monique Chism and NMAH Director Anthea Hartig for beginning official museum events with land acknowledgments recognizing Indigenous peoples as the original inhabitants of the land.
Boarding School History Faces Scrutiny
The report denounces an NMAH exhibit that details the history of the federal Indian boarding school system, to which Native children were forcibly sent and stripped of their culture and language in the name of assimilation.
It says the museum’s portrayal of America as having no single culture, language or narrative conflicts with its acknowledgment of the damage done to Native languages through boarding schools. “The one place NMAH admits a native country’s language matters is in reference to Indians losing their native language in American boarding schools,” the report states.
