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Christopher Lyman is the author of “The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions.” He lives in Lincolnville.

When I went to work at the Smithsonian in 1979, it was a bastion of privilege. Founded by wealthy philanthropists and built largely during the last Gilded Age, it still radiated the values of that time through much of the 20th century.

The institution in 1979 did not overtly censor views on race, culture or class. Most of its non-clerical employees, however, came from wealthy white families bearing degrees from elite universities, and the institution presented history through a lens of their privilege. I was hired by the curator of North American ethnology, who wanted me to write a book that would question the institution’s traditional bias.

The book I wrote, “The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions,” was superficially about a photographer named Edward S. Curtis who professed to have created an exhaustive document of “the Indians of the United States and Alaska.”

At its core, my book was really about how white Americans had created an image of “Indianness” that fostered beliefs in white superiority and overlooked the vast diversity among the cultures and peoples of this continent. It was published by the Smithsonian Institution Press in 1982 and accompanied an exhibition on the same topic that I curated for the institution’s traveling exhibition service.

The Smithsonian, receiving more than half of its funding from the government, and with a board of regents stocked with politicians, has always been vulnerable to political interference.

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At the time my book was published, Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator and the GOP’s 1964 presidential candidate, whom many consider the father of the contemporary Republican Party, was on the board of regents. He was also a preeminent collector of photographs by Edward S. Curtis. It took acts of personal courage by the directors of the press and exhibition service and an act of institutional courage by the Smithsonian to publish my book.

During the decades since my book and exhibition came out, the Smithsonian has done much to expand beyond the narrow bias of my era there. The views of American history that it has fostered are vastly closer to truth than those that prevailed in my time, and until recently, it showed promise of proceeding in the pursuit of truth.

Now, all of that threatens to come to a grinding halt. The Trump White House has demanded to review Smithsonian social media posts, publications and exhibitions to make certain they comport with its desire to rewrite American history according to its white supremacist views.

Here in Maine, the Smithsonian’s only affiliate is the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, a museum devoted to the story of the Wabanaki Nations. Any truthful telling of that story has to include acts of terrible brutality by white people — exactly the sort of thing the White House would like to silence.

Authoritarians really aren’t interested in pursuing truth. They always want to censor history to serve their narrative and silence other views.  If we are to avoid sliding into full dictatorship, we will need many acts of courage to stand up to the would-be censors.

So far, very few politicians of either major party have demonstrated such courage, and it appears to be up to us, the people to whom the Smithsonian says it belongs, to demand that they do.

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