The Smithsonian Has No Business Saying America Is Built On ‘Stolen Land’
John FonteWe 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.”