The Smithsonian Has No Business Saying America Is Built On ‘Stolen Land’:
We need a new kind of land acknowledgement that testifies to American greatness.
Congressman Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., began the first of two congressional hearings on problems at the Smithsonian Institution by playing video clips of Anthea Hartig, the Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) repeating land acknowledgements as she opened various museum events. Director Hartig would thank specific tribes and express gratitude for “the opportunity to work and live in their territories” or give thanks to the “first peoples on whose land we gather today.”
Note that Hartig did not say that NMAH events in say, California or Washington DC, occurred on land previously inhabited by American Indians, but on land that is presently on “their territory.” Congressman Burchett stated that logically this means that Hartig believes that Americans are “illegally occupying their own country.” Considering her viewpoint, Burchett asked Hartig: “I’m wondering have you ever planned on donating any of your personal property or any of the property of the Smithsonian to any of these tribes?” Hartig replied, “I don’t believe that is pertinent to the conversation, sir.”
Throughout the hearing and during her leadership of the Smithsonian’s premier history museum, Director Hartig has emphasized that issues such as land acknowledgments and even the question of “loving America” are “complicated.” No doubt the issue of land acknowledgments is “complicated,” but not in the manner that the current leadership of the Smithsonian maintains.
Smithsonian leaders including the Secretary, Lonnie Bunch, and American history museum Director Anthea Hartig consistently claim that they are presenting a nuanced, neutral, unbiased narrative of America’s story to our citizens and foreign visitors. However, the story the Smithsonian tells of the history between the American republic and the Indian nations of North America is anything but nuanced, neutral, or unbiased. For example, a Smithsonian video (“The Indian Problem”) explicitly states that the United States committed genocide against American Indians.
Genocide is legally defined by the UN genocide treaty as the deliberate, intentional, planned extermination of a particular “national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” For genocide to exist there must be an “intent to destroy” the group. In the Smithsonian video, an exhibit curator declares: “We don’t make the case that there was genocide. We know that there was.”
On July 4, 2026 the White House issued a scathing critique of the Smithsonian (“Saving America’s Story”) that denounced the museum’s leaders for reframing “America’s founding as a fundamentally oppressive and genocidal effort to take Native American’s land and oppress their culture and peoples.” The Smithsonian “allege[s] that the U.S. rests on stolen land.” --->READ MORE HERE
Smithsonian Leader Behind Leftward Degradation Resigns:
At seemingly every Smithsonian museum, there is anti-American propaganda.
Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution who led its leftward degradation, resigned Tuesday after years of overseeing the advancement of anti-American propaganda at the nation’s premier art, culture, and history establishment.
Bunch, who took over as secretary in 2019 but has been at the Smithsonian for almost 38 years, founded the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture prior to becoming secretary. Under his leadership, the Smithsonian added to its insidious track record of partitioning its museums along racial and gender ideology lines. He plans to leave the Smithsonian by the end of the year, according to the resignation announcement.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who is chancellor of the Smithsonian by law, lauded Bunch’s tenure in a statement reacting to the resignation, saying, “Secretary Bunch has pursued excellence in the telling of our nation’s story. The Regents, and the Smithsonian, have benefited greatly from his wisdom, vision and leadership.” However, as The Federalist has chronicled, the Smithsonian has been in stark decline for years.
For example, the National Museum of American History’s director, Anthea Hartig, has repeatedly parroted a land acknowledgment claiming that the United States is on stolen land taken from American Indian tribes. A video from the institution called “The Indian Problem” asserts that the American government committed genocide against American Indians.
As John Fonte noted in these pages, Bunch and Hartig “consistently claim that they are presenting a nuanced, neutral, unbiased narrative of America’s story to our citizens and foreign visitors.” But they actually use the “crude weaponized concept” of “stolen land” to “‘problematize’ our founding (to use Anthea Hartig’s own language) and, in the process, de-legitimize historic America. This is all part of the effort to fundamentally transform our nation.”
The American History Museum also referred to the founding of America and civilizational expansion as the “profound unsettling of the continent.”
That kind of propaganda, and much more, has been ingrained in the Smithsonian for a long time. The institution partnered with the far-left historical revisionism group the Zinn Education Project (ZEP) to participate in “teach-ins” for teachers to receive continuing education credit.
One of the ZEP’s initiatives has been to abolish Columbus Day, and it has been partially successful, especially at the state and local levels. President Joe Biden officially proclaimed the protest “holiday” of Indigenous Peoples’ Day every year he was in office.
ZEP also advances fake, anti-American histories about the American Founding and Revolution, slavery, the Civil War, World War II, and demonizes the anti-communists in the House Un-American Activities Committee while shielding the role of communism in the American labor movement and civil rights movement. --->READ MORE HERE
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