This is Not About Truth: An Open Letter on the Fight for History
The Trump Administration’s Executive Order, deceptively titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” is neither about truth nor sanity. It is an attack on those who have fought to tell the full, complex, and often uncomfortable story of this country.
Days after the order was issued, the Department of Government Efficiency placed the entire staff of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) on administrative leave and announced deep cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities—moves meant to undermine the institutions that preserve, interpret, and share our nation’s history.
We are educators, scientists, and scholars working across disciplines. Some of us are settlers, some are Native American, and all of us are committed to transforming natural history: from a field shaped by colonialism and extraction into one that reckons with harm and serves justice and collective survival. We write together to speak out against this coordinated campaign of repression.
This order is part of a broader authoritarian agenda to censor dissent, control public institutions, and rewrite history in service of power. By defunding agencies and removing staff, the Administration is building a world where history belongs to the state, where libraries, museums, and schools become tools of propaganda, and where structural racism is not just denied, but actively re-inscribed.
From banning books to restricting language in exhibits and curricula, this is the architecture of a new narrative regime. And we’ve seen it before. Authoritarian regimes around the world have used the same tactics: purge cultural workers, silence opposition, and replace history with myth. The U.S. government has done the same to Indigenous communities—through boarding schools, language bans, and criminalizing ceremony. These latest policies do not break from this history––they continue it.
The Administration has gone so far as to ban or restrict words like Native American, Black, immigrants, activism, climate change, and pollution from use in federal agencies. This is not about bureaucratic efficiency—it’s about erasure. The histories of Indigenous resistance, labor struggles, civil rights struggles, and environmental justice movements aren’t footnotes. They’re foundational. They carry lessons and legacies, and they open possibilities for a future rooted in dignity, solidarity, and care.
We write in defense of libraries and museums—but more than that, in defense of history itself. We call on institutions, educators, and the public to reject this authoritarian rewrite, to stand against censorship, defend those under attack, and respond not with caution, but with full-throated conviction.
We choose to stand on the right side of history: where it is not sanitized, privatized, or weaponized, but used to understand the present—and fight for a just and safe future where all life can thrive.
Signed,
The Red Natural History Fellows of the The Natural History Museum
Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes Sinixt and Okanogan), American Indian Studies and environmental justice author and educator
Rosalyn LaPier (Blackfeet/Métis), PhD, environmental historian
Ashley Dawson, PhD, environmental humanities scholar
Kai Bosworth, PhD, cultural geographer
Natchee Barnd PhD, Ethnic Studies and Indigenous Studies scholar
