I am a high school student who is not old enough to vote yet and even I know that America is a miracle; a miracle made up of the stories and possibilities of all of us. No single American story has more value or validity than another, because all of our stories are what actually make America extraordinary. No matter your origins — whether you are descended from Indigenous Americans, conquistadors, religious refugees, enslaved people, famine victims, indentured laborers, war survivors and escapees, students and migrants seeking opportunity, or any number of the many thousands of origin stories that we can count as “American” — your story is integral to the beautiful and miraculous story of our nation. This extraordinary story is a tapestry woven by threads of many colors, textures, lengths and tensile strengths, each holding a unique and important detail that fortifies and beautifies the whole. Deleting the complexity, the nuance and the presence of any of those unique threads diminishes the fact that they are a critical part of the whole.

The March 27, 2025, Executive Order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” is an insidious and craven attempt to eliminate the stories of countless Americans. By manipulating the definitions of the words “truth and sanity” to assert a more singular view of the origins of the American people, this order seeks not to center the truth of all of our histories, but rather to elevate the power and dominance of only the Americans who resemble the author of the order. In the order, it is argued that “museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives.” This positioning of our varied stories as “divisive” is a thinly-veiled and obvious tactic of centering the stories of only a few Americans. It is built on the lie that America is made of only one kind of people with one origin story. The targeted dismantling of programs within the Smithsonian Institute’s twenty-one museums and educational institutions that tell the fuller stories of our nation and all of its people is explicitly aimed at erasure and demonstrates willful disregard of the lived experiences of millions of us—past, present and future.

Stand up for what you know is true. Stand up for the interwoven threads that are each of our families’ stories and lived experiences. Stand up for a nation that has courageously tried to tell its own story with honesty and humility, a national story that acknowledges even the difficult and dark parts that have come with the world’s greatest experiment in democracy and plurality. To distort or hide these complexities is to deny some of the essential ingredients that make our nation truly capable of greatness. To compose a fiction that eliminates the simple, observable realities of millions dooms us to a stunted and regressive national identity. In order to keep America innovative, creative, evolving and extraordinary, we need to tell the full story of America and her people. We need to be honest about our past and open-minded about our future.

Sign and share this petition to stand up for all of our stories and to defend the history of all Americans.