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.”
The “stolen land” narrative is closely tied to the promotion of land acknowledgements. This interpretation has become dominant in America’s universities, cultural institutions, and schools. The largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association (NEA) developed a guide for land acknowledgments: “Don’t sugarcoat the past. Use terms like genocide, ethnic cleansing, stolen land … to reflect actions taken by colonizers.”
The “stolen land/land acknowledgement” symbiosis is not an unbiased, nuanced, good faith historical interpretation, but rather it is a crude weaponized concept. Its purpose is 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.
Let us examine the “stolen land” narrative historically. Who stole land from whom? For instance, the Lakota Sioux claim the Black Hills of South Dakota as their sacred land. They even successfully sued the U.S. government before the Supreme Court in 1980 and were awarded compensation, but they refused any payment, insisting that they wanted the land instead. Justice William Rehnquist in his dissent while criticizing the U.S. government’s “less than admirable tactics” in the Black Hills noted “the Indians were not lacking their share of villainy either.” Indeed, around 1776 the Lakota Sioux arrived in the Black Hills and took (stole) the land from the Cheyenne and the Crow. Earlier the Cheyenne had driven out (or stolen) this same land from the Kiowa.
Yes, history and the issue of stolen land is complicated. Since we are Americans celebrating our 250th anniversary as an independent republic, I suggest a different type of land acknowledgement is in order. Something like the following:
We acknowledge and are grateful for those Americans who have gone before us. So here is to the Pilgrams and the pioneers; the settlers and the homesteaders; the farmers and the ranchers; the frontiersmen and the cowboys; the teachers and the preachers; the schoolmarms and the clergy and the sheriffs and judges−who brought Judeo-Christian civilization and law and order to the men of the Westward expansion; to the Oneida, Choctaw, and the Pawnee warriors, who in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the post-Civil War West respectively, fought with the United States and against our enemies; to the visionaries of Manifest Destiny and the statesmen and soldiers who made it happen. They all fulfilled Thomas Jefferson’s dream expressed in a Christmas Day 1780 letter to George Rogers Clark of an “empire of liberty” across the continent of North America. To all of them, we are grateful.
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