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- By Levi Rickert
Opinion. The National Museum of the American Indian — with locations in New York City and Washington, D.C. — is one of eight Smithsonian institutions under audit in accordance with President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14253, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.
The directive came from the White House last month in a letter to Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie G. Brunch III that demanded a full audit of content — from exhibit texts and online materials to curatorial process documents and grant records.
This entire process represents an effort to sanitize history by emphasizing only the positive events while ignoring negative ones. The approach disregards the reality that, like American history itself, the lives of all Americans are shaped by both good and bad experiences.
At last week’s National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) offered a pointed perspective on this trend of historical sanitization.
Schmitt’s speech was entitled “What is an American?”
In his speech, Schmitt, a staunch conservative, claimed that America was founded by and intended for Europeans who came from across the Atlantic.
“This is who we are. We’re a nation of settlers, explorers and pioneers — born on the ocean waters that carried the first ships to our shores and forged in the crucible of a wild frontier. Our people tamed a continent, built a civilization from the wilderness, and wrote our nation’s name in history,” Schmitt said.
Schmitt alluded to Manifest Destiny, which allowed for Europeans to come to this continent in the name of religion devoted to their cause and their God.
“We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith. Our ancestors were driven here by destiny, possessed by urgent and fiery conviction, by burning belief, devoted to their cause and their God,” Schmitt said.
He added: “They believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants. They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us. America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny.”
Schmitt’s version of history is a story America likes to tell itself. It’s a tale of rugged pioneers, of brave Continental soldiers, of pilgrims and settlers, of a people chosen by destiny to tame a wilderness and build a nation. This story is often repeated around campfires, in history classrooms, and in speeches that frame America’s past as heroic, inevitable, and righteous.
But stories are not the same as truth. And the truth is more complicated — and more painful — than many are willing to accept.
Schmitt diminishes Native nations’ sovereignty and equates Indigenous resistance to colonial invasion with barbarism. This narrative fits into the larger story of Manifest Destiny — as if American expansion was a divine mission, not a deliberate policy of displacement and extermination.
The land that became the United States was not empty. It was not unclaimed, uncared for or unused. It was home to tens of millions of Indigenous people who had built civilizations, confederacies, and cultures over thousands of years.
To describe America as a “birthright” given to settler descendants is to erase Native existence entirely — and to excuse the genocide that came with colonial expansion.
In 2025, we are still being told that America is a gift “handed down” from these settlers, that it “belongs to us.” But who is “us”? And who gets to decide?
Apparently, only those of European descent by Schmitt’s standards.
The American ideal — the one enshrined in the Constitution, the one that still calls people from around the world seeking liberty and justice — is not about bloodlines or birthrights. It is about a proposition. A powerful one. That all people are created equal–not only those of European descent.
The proposition that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. That the rights of individuals are sacred.
If America means anything, it must mean that. If it only means land stolen by one group and “handed down” to their descendants, then it’s not a democracy—it’s a caste system.
Romanticizing Manifest Destiny isn’t just bad history — it’s dangerous. It blinds us to the realities of how this country came to be. It erases Native voices. It denies the truth of genocide, land theft, and broken treaties. And it teaches future generations that domination is something to be proud of.
Indigenous people are still here. We are not footnotes in your story. We are living tribal nations with rights, memories and futures. We do not need to be “included” in America — we are America. We will continue to speak, to teach, and to remind this country that its soul lies not in conquest, but in justice.
If America is only for some, it’s not worthy of any.
To answer Schmitt’s question: What is an American? I argue Native Americans are the first Americans and should be afforded the respect they deserve.
Thayék gde nwéndëmen - We are all related.
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