President Trump is ordering a sweeping review of the Smithsonian museums ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary next year. In a letter to the head of the institution, the White House said it wants to ensure the museums show the “unity, progress and enduring values that define the American story.”
The review is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to remove criticism of America from cultural institutions
In an interview with Here & Now’s Robin Young, Sarah Weicksel, executive director of the American Historical Association, said it’s important that the entirety of the American story is told at the Smithsonian.
“In honoring the historical record, we have to talk about race, and we have to talk about racism,” said, Weicksel, a historian who once worked at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “We can’t not talk about enslavement in the United States. These are simply historical facts. They are integral to understanding aspects of our shared history.”
3 questions with Sarah Weicksel
Is there something different about the Smithsonian? Even though it’s traditionally nonpartisan, it’s run by a board of regents overseen by Congress. Is there something that makes it more governmental where in fact unlike a private museum it should bow to the will of a president?
“No, the Smithsonian has an extraordinary task at hand. It is our national museum. It belongs to all of the American people. It was founded for the purpose of increasing and diffusing knowledge for the American people, and that means that it is tasked with explaining a whole complete, really messy history to the American public and to international visitors alike. So it in many ways has a very expansive remit for including histories of all people in the United States and beyond.”
If you were still in your job, what are some of the things you would have to be thinking about? What would you be reviewing? What would you be reporting? What would you be worried about?
“One of the things that I worked on at one point in my career was on the Carlisle Indian School, which was explicitly designed to ‘Americanize’ Native American children. They were required to remove any of their native clothing. They were required to cease using native languages and all aspects of culture and heritage that were not in accordance with white Euro-American expectations. And some of the objects in the Smithsonian really tell that story very powerfully. There’s clothing in the National Museum of Natural History that’s part of the anthropological collections that were collected during that process. So, you know, there’s really within the museum all of these objects that enable you to tell a complex story just like that.”
How do museums exist if they can’t acknowledge the mistakes of the past?
“I agree. When I was a teacher, one of the most important things I found was for students to connect to the past. They needed to see something about themselves in it. And that is the same for museums as well. There needs to be something that people can connect to. If you come into the museum and you don’t see people who look like you, people who have had experiences like you, you notice that, and it seems like, you are seemingly someone who has no history. And that’s simply untrue.”
This interview was edited for clarity
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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