IndigenousNetwork was able to attend a briefing hosted by American Community Media that examined who gets to define the history of the United States as the country approaches its 250th anniversary. The discussion came amid renewed political pressure on museums, schools, and public institutions to narrow public narratives, a dynamic that Indigenous and ethnic media outlets have long tracked at the community level. Speakers framed the moment not as a symbolic debate about memory, but as a structural struggle over power, visibility, and whose experiences are treated as central to the national story.
Sandy Close, executive director of American Community Media and a longtime organizer of ethnic media networks, opened the briefing by pointing to what she described as a coordinated effort “to retell the history of America as a whites-only drama,” one that minimizes nonwhite participation and treats multicultural history as a deviation rather than a foundation. She linked recent executive actions and public rhetoric to tangible consequences, including pressure to cancel museum exhibits, rename public sites, and censor school curricula. For Indigenous newsrooms, these pressures mirror ongoing fights over how treaties, land, and sovereignty are represented or omitted entirely in public discourse.
The first speaker, Ann Burroughs, president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum, grounded the conversation in institutional memory and lived consequence. Burroughs, an internationally recognized human rights leader and former political prisoner under apartheid in South Africa, leads a museum founded to ensure that the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II is neither forgotten nor repeated. She drew a direct parallel between ethnic media and ethnic museums, arguing that both function as keepers of memory in moments when official narratives retreat. “Who gets to decide what this country remembers?” she asked. “Who gets to decide what it forgets, or what it erases.” Burroughs warned that museums are facing mounting pressure to alter interpretation and avoid politically inconvenient histories, noting that attacks on cultural institutions and attacks on journalism are often part of the same effort to control public meaning.
Margaret Huang followed with a historical and legal lens shaped by decades of civil and human rights advocacy. Huang currently serves as president and chief executive officer of the Southern Poverty Law Center and its Action Fund, where she has led efforts to dismantle white supremacy and confront extremism, including during the racial justice uprisings of 2020 and the January 6 insurrection. Drawing on SPLC research, Huang described how Confederate monuments spread across the country long after the Civil War, often during periods of backlash against civil rights movements. She emphasized that these memorials were not neutral artifacts, but political tools designed to normalize a distorted version of history. When asked about claims that teaching this history makes students feel guilty, Huang rejected the premise. “Guilt is inherently part of learning,” she said, arguing that confronting harm is necessary to understanding how people have resisted injustice and how change has occurred.
Veteran journalist Ray Suarez expanded the conversation to immigration, media, and national identity. Suarez, host of the PBS series Wisdom Keepers and author of We Are Home: Becoming American in the 21st Century, framed current efforts to narrow American history as a rollback of decades of scholarship and reporting. “Latino history is American history,” he said. “And American history is Latino history.” Suarez, whose career includes roles at PBS NewsHour, NPR, and Al Jazeera America, described the present moment as a power play aimed at restoring a singular, white-centered narrative. He argued that erasing long-standing histories of Indigenous, Black, and immigrant communities makes contemporary policies around immigration and belonging easier to justify, particularly in moments of demographic change.
Anneshia Hardy, a cultural narrative strategist and founding executive director of Alabama Values, gave language to what many speakers implied. Hardy, whose work spans voting rights, narrative infrastructure, and community-based journalism across the U.S. South, described the current moment as one of “narrative governance.” She explained how social media accelerates disinformation by rewarding speed and outrage, flattening complex histories into slogans that obscure structural power. Hardy’s work, which includes advising national organizations and producing documentary projects on democracy and representation, focuses on reconnecting historical memory to present-day policy. When communities are pushed out of official memory, she argued, it becomes easier to push them out of legal protection and political imagination.
Across the briefing, speakers returned to the same conclusion: documentation itself is an act of resistance. Burroughs urged journalists to record events as they unfold, noting that today’s reporting becomes tomorrow’s archive. Huang emphasized that storytelling can counter fear by showing how communities have challenged oppression before. Suarez warned that abandoning factual history leaves space for myth to harden into policy. Hardy closed by reminding attendees that progress has never been automatic, and that when narrative work slows, regression fills the gap.
For Indigenous journalists, the conversation echoed long-standing realities. Battles over history are not abstract. They shape how land is understood, how sovereignty is recognized, and whether communities are seen as contemporary political actors or relics of the past. As public institutions face increasing pressure to sanitize or silence, the role of Indigenous and ethnic media grows more urgent. The work is not only to report what is happening now, but to ensure that future generations cannot plausibly claim they did not know.
