The US Government Doesn’t Want You Talking About Kinship – But You Should Anyway

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This post is part of the Tracking the Effects: Environmental History and the Current United States Federal Administration series edited by Jessica DeWitt, Shannon Stunden Bower, and Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles. Submissions for this series are being accepted on an ongoing basis. Learn more here.

On May 12, 2025, Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] administrator Lee Zeldin announced “the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation our nation has seen.” Not only was his agency about to roll back, slow, and altogether end an array of policies designed to protect human and nonhuman health, but Zeldin’s EPA was proudly “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” In the weeks that followed, many climate reports and studies were removed from government websites. The federal government’s war on environmental scholarship had claimed another victim.

The Trump administration’s targets also extended into the realm of environmental justice. According to Earth Justice, a nonprofit environmental law organization, between January and July 2025, the government ended over 350 grants dedicated to both scholarly and material projects related to environmental and climate justice. HR 1, the recent budget legislation passed by the Republican-controlled Congress, similarly dashed hopes for future funding for many of these grants.

Scholars and officials engaging in environmental history and environmental studies within the US government are thus facing an existential threat. The changes wrought by the new presidential administration extend even beyond cuts to funding, reduced staffing, and hidden research. The government’s war on itself also involves ideological warfare against the study of history.

In 2024-2025, Mount Rushmore National Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota hired me as a postdoctoral fellow as part of a partnership with the Mellon Foundation. The goal of this fellowship program was to “to advance the National Park Service education mission through new research.” This work was to be accomplished via partnership with specific parks, giving scholars the chance to “work with National Park Service mentors, scholars, and community partners to complete original research projects, and develop new interpretive and educational programming.” My project specifically was to research and create public-facing material about the ongoing Indigenous history of Mount Rushmore. By December of 2024, after several site visits and much hands-on research in the bowels of Mount Rushmore, I was preparing to put my collected material online as web content accessible via QR codes placed throughout the Memorial. Then came January.

For those of us in the National Park Service Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, the weeks after 20 January 2025 were a period of confusion and uncertainty. For over a month, it was not clear whether the program would be allowed to continue, be modified, or end entirely. During this time, much of my work slowed to a crawl while I waited to hear whether anything I made would ever see the light of day. In March, it became clear that the program as constituted would not survive the rash of Executive Orders emanating from the White House. In particular, the February 26th Executive Order 14222 was a concern because, among other actions, it ordered all executive branch departments to review grant agreements to “reduce overall spending.” This, combined with Executive Order 14253 which alleged to “Restore Truth and Sanity to American History” via unprecedented censorship of history programs funded by the federal government, made the NPS Mellon Program partnership untenable. At the same moment, the right wing Heritage Foundation published articles decrying the Mellon Foundation’s work funding humanities scholarship, including specifically the NPS fellowship program. By April, the NPS had severed ties with the Mellon foundation. The Trump administration had decided that funding history work by recent PhDs in the humanities was no longer in line with the NPS mission.

The NPS is one of the leading purveyors of history education in the United States, with all NPS sites incorporating human stories onto the landscape via waysides, visitor’s centers, and ranger talks. Parks are also fundamentally environmental in nature, even at sites like Mount Rushmore that bear so much evidence of human-induced change. My project at Rushmore, like the work of many of my peers in the program, was thus environmental history at its core. Central to my research was the issue of how Indigenous peoples see the mountain as it stands today, carved into human form. What does it mean to be a good relative, to see a mountain as kin? Is it possible to do so when that mountain also serves as a monument to American settler colonialism?

A color postcard of a mountain's sheer, gray, granite face set against a pale blue sky. Below, a forest of dark green Ponderosa pine stretches out toward the viewer.
A 1940s postcard of Mount Rushmore as it looked before the carving began in 1927. Mount Rushmore stands within South Dakota’s Black Hills. Used with permission from the South Dakota State Historical Society.

The educator and musician Sequioa Crosswhite (Cheyenne River Sioux) answered that question best in an oral history interview I recorded with him toward the end of my time in the NPS Mellon Program. “Those are graffiti,” he said of the Rushmore carvings. Crosswhite works at the Lakota-Nakota-Dakota Heritage Village at Mount Rushmore, a slice of Indigenous culture and history maintained throughout the summer at the memorial. Crosswhite feels that Rushmore does not speak to Indigenous views on the meaning of the Black Hills: “[The monument has] nothing to do with Indians, or Lakota way of life, because this is made by man. We want to celebrate what the creator has made,” he said. Mount Rushmore is fundamentally settler colonial in its conception and its design.

Carving the mountain Lakotas call The Six Grandfathers into Mount Rushmore was thus not the work of a good relative. A society that blasts a mountainside into human faces sixty feet tall is not a society that respects the nonhuman world, and Rushmore stands as a testament to anti-Indigenous American policies dating back centuries. This Heritage Village where Crosswhite spends summers educating tourists operates right under the nose of George Washington, who the Haudenosaunee called “Town Destroyer” after his family’s history of violence in Iroquoia. The colonial narratives run deep at Mount Rushmore, having been carved into the granite a century ago.

A black and white photo of an old model of car driving along a winding road in a forest. Above, a mountain stands against the sky, with the profile of George Washington's head carved into a rock outcropping.
A car drives along Highway 244 in the Black Hills of South Dakota, under the recently completed sculpture of George Washington in Mount Rushmore. Taken near Keystone, South Dakota. Used with permission from the South Dakota State Historical Society.

Since ending my time in the NPS Mellon Program, and while much still remains uncertain, I am hopeful that my work on Mount Rushmore may yet find a home online, whether through a site affiliated with the NPS or through a different outlet. Indeed, given the ideological war being waged on the environmental humanities and environmental scholarship generally, I see it as imperative that I, and scholars like me, continue to push the public to ask challenging questions through the work that we do. Questions like, “how do we treat a mountain like a relative?” are provocative because they force people to question core tenets of American settler societies, such as the hierarchies that put “human” above “nonhuman.”

“And as the Trump administration is aware, questioning hierarchies can be a dangerous thing to those who benefit from the status quo. Environmental history can thus be a radical act, one that runs counter to the power dynamics now entrenched in Washington.”

And as the Trump administration is aware, questioning hierarchies can be a dangerous thing to those who benefit from the status quo. Environmental history can thus be a radical act, one that runs counter to the power dynamics now entrenched in Washington. Those in power who are trying to silence environmental scholarship are scared, and indeed they are right to be: you can delete a study from a webpage, and you can end a government program, but it is not so easy to eliminate an idea.

Feature Image: President Trump stands before Mount Rushmore during a speech on July 3, 2020, Official White House photo by Shealah Craighead. “Mount Rushmore Fireworks Celebration” by The White House is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.
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Stephen Hausmann

Stephen Hausmann is a scholar and professor whose work focuses on the environmental history of the American West.

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