As Trump targets national parks that 'disparage Americans,’ advocates warn California history is at stake

When U.S. National Park Service staff found out this spring that they were being instructed to scrub entire parks of any materials that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” reactions among workers ranged from disbelief to anger.

“Sometimes I’m raging. Sometimes I’m in denial,” said one park superintendent, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation and losing their job.

It had already been a chaotic year for national parks under President Donald Trump’s second administration. First came the attempt to fire thousands of employees of the National Park Service and impose a hiring freeze — followed by threats to cut billions in funding and sell off federal lands, including some less popular national parks.

Then, in March, Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It ordered staff working at all National Park Service locations to remove any content that casts Americans in a negative light from parks, monuments and memorials.

It’s thrown staff into further chaos.

A view of a welcome sign as hundreds of tourists and photographers flock in Yosemite National Park.

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“Things that would normally take us years to do, like exhibit development, we’re trying to figure out how to wholesale make changes that many of us are morally opposed to in weeks,” the anonymous superintendent said. “It’s kind of wild.”

Many parks staffers are wary of speaking up on the record. “There’s worry and fear that telling the truth can get them in trouble,” said Neal Desai, Pacific regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association.

Across the nation, from Yosemite National Park in California to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., staff are now grappling with what the anonymous superintendent called a “Herculean” task: Inspect, document and potentially change or cover up thousands of signs ahead of a looming September deadline from the federal government.

Staff and advocates at California’s iconic national parks say they’re especially worried about the potential threat to the state’s cultural memory — and that the very nature of historical truth is now at stake.

Chaos and confusion

Trump’s order addressed what it called a “distorted narrative” about American history — one the White House claimed was permeating the country’s national parks, monuments and other federal institutions.

In demanding the signage review, Trump instructed parks staff to “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people” and “the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”

“Interpretive materials that disproportionately emphasize negative aspects of U.S. history or historical figures, without acknowledging broader context or national progress, can unintentionally distort understanding rather than enrich it,” the National Park Service told KQED in an emailed statement.

The dismay and disbelief among park staff were instantaneous. “This is the fascist playbook,” said one park ranger, who also wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “You silence the voices that are inconvenient to you, and you control history, you control the narratives.”

U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum doubled down on Trump’s order in May, further instructing parks to report on any statues or monuments that had been removed since 2020 at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, including Confederate monuments.

Waysigns, interpretive signs, exhibits, brochures, films screened within park buildings, even merchandise sold in park kiosks and bookstores — according to the orders, all of it had to be entered into a federal database for the government’s review. Staff were also ordered to post new signs around parks land urging the public to submit feedback online about parks and their signage.

“Frankly, it’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen in this country,” California Rep. Jared Huffman, who serves on the House Committee on Natural Resources, told KQED. In August, Huffman co-authored a letter in response to the White House’s orders, requesting the rationale for “ongoing efforts to rewrite history,” and asking for more information about who within the federal government would ultimately decide what can or can’t go in national parks.

And in a state with as many parks resources and visitorship as California, the orders required a particularly enormous undertaking. The state has nine major national parks — the most of any state across the country — including Yosemite and Joshua Tree, each of which regularly receives 3 to 4 million visitors annually.

That’s not to mention the dozens of smaller national historic landmarks, smaller parks, monuments and historic trails on a scale matched only by Washington, D.C., including Alcatraz, the Presidio and Fort Point just in the Bay Area.

Unknown judges, unclear timeline

Who exactly within the federal government would make the final decisions on thousands of signs — covering hundreds of years of history — remains unclear.

Huffman said he has yet to receive any response to the Committee on Natural Resources’ queries. And the NPS did not respond to KQED’s query on who is evaluating submissions, saying only that they are done “manually.”

As first reported by the New York Times, the federal government originally told parks they’d know which exhibits were slated for removal by Wednesday. The anonymous superintendent said staff were initially told that a panel of subject matter experts would issue a memo on what should ultimately be removed.

But in mid-August, they were told they’d instead only “receive an email that identified which submissions were in conflict, but not tell us what exactly was considered problematic or why,” the superintendent said. And when the emails came, they didn’t make clear exactly when staff should pull down any material that had been, in the government’s words, “found to be out of conformance.” (The NPS did not respond to KQED’s questions about the timeline for removals.)

Ultimately, the confusing rollout has put the onus on parks staff to “determine what someone thought was in conflict” with the order, the superintendent said, and then decide themselves how to move forward in a way they think the federal government wants.

“Which is really frustrating,” they said. “Do we change a word in a sentence, or do we take down a whole exhibit? Or somewhere in between?”

But one of the first high-profile examples of such removal has already happened here in California — offering insight into the kind of history that’s being targeted.

Change already comes for California

With its towering redwoods, Muir Woods National Monument is one of California’s most popular parks, with annual visitorship of more than a million people.

In 2021, Muir Woods park rangers developed an exhibit called “History Under Construction,” which took the form of sticky notes placed on a permanent sign. The sticky notes represented an effort to add context to the park’s history, highlighting the foundational roles of women and Indigenous people in its creation and the oftentimes racist and violent past of its more notable founders.

Christine Lehnertz, president and CEO of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, stands in Muir Woods National Monument.

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“Part of our duty in the National Park Service is to tell the full story” of Muir Woods’ stewardship, the exhibit read.

But in mid-July, Muir Woods staff removed the sticky note exhibit altogether, with a spokesperson for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area confirming its removal was prompted by Trump’s executive order.

The swiftness of the Muir Woods removal was jarring to some observers. “We were surprised that changes happened at Muir Woods so quickly,” said Chris Lehnertz, president and CEO of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, the nonprofit partner of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which manages Muir Woods.

The Muir Woods removal was ordered by a higher-up outside of the park, according to Lehnertz and an anonymous source with knowledge of the exhibit’s development. The National Park Service did not reply to KQED’s request for confirmation of the directive’s source.

The federal government has yet to make widespread directives to parks staff to enact removals. Yet preemptive changes within other national parks have already been witnessed — with apparent anxiety over landing in the White House’s crosshairs even pre-dating the “Restoring Truth and Sanity” executive order.

As documented by the Resistance Rangers advocacy group, the website for New York’s Stonewall National Monument was altered in February to remove references to transgender people. Language on other national park websites was removed in February and then restored, including information about abolitionist leader Harriet Tubman on an NPS webpage about the Underground Railroad.

In the Bay Area, as reported by Richmondside, a handful of staff members at Rosie the Riveter World War II Homefront National Historic Park briefly removed an exhibit focused on the LGBTQ+ history of the region right after Trump’s inauguration in January, before putting it back up a few days later.

“It’s an anxious time to be a superintendent,” Lehnertz said.

Donna Graves, an independent historian who helped develop the Rosie the Riveter Park back in 2000, said Rosie is the kind of national park site where “inclusive storytelling permeates every aspect of the exhibits in the visitor center, the handouts, the films that are shown.”

Parks staff found themselves in a quandary, said Graves, who organized a rally against the order in August. Should employees submit every piece of content in the park for federal review, “seeing it as sort of flooding the zone”?

“Others took the stance of, ‘Well, we’re not ‘inappropriately’ disparaging anybody. We think what we’re doing is appropriate,’” Graves said. “So they did not report any content.”

‘Hard history’

The idea of taking a second look at history isn’t actually new for the National Park Service.

Lehnertz said when Jonathan Jarvis was parks director from 2009 to 2017, he made a sweeping effort to broaden the narratives on display, shifting from a previous focus on military and political history to including individuals’ stories, expanding the timeline to before the country’s founding and “opening up the story” of American history, she said.

Jarvis, she said, “helped us understand that the preamble to the Constitution — ‘We, the people’ — means ‘We, all the people; we, all the stories.’ And that means hard history sometimes,” she said.

By contrast, the Trump administration’s approach to revisiting history “isn’t an honest exercise,” argued National Parks Conservation Association’s Desai.

“It’s premeditated — there’s a goal in mind at the end,” Desai said. “They’re not really looking at all these things in a critical way or in a scholarly way. It’s about: ‘We want to erase certain parts of history, and clamp down on the Park Service from providing Americans with a full picture.’”

Jonathan Jarvis sits outside of his home in Pinole.

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Jarvis — who lives in Contra Costa County after retiring from NPS — agreed. Had he still been at the helm of national parks, Jarvis said, he’d have “gone upstairs and told them this was a really stupid idea.”

“Just the task of it in of itself is completely daunting,” he said. “To think that there’s going to be somebody back there with either the intelligence — or the capacity — to somehow give a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to a sign that is in some visitor center in Dinosaur National Monument that talks about evolution.”

“It’s absurd,” he said.

‘Going backwards’

The federal government’s orders are forcing national parks around the country to review hundreds of years of history — events that often sharply illustrate the human cost of that state’s development.

In states including Pennsylvania, Florida, Tennessee and Louisiana, staff have been asked to flag mentions of slavery for possible removal.

In California, where the arrival of white settlers in the 1840s and the subsequent Gold Rush sparked a decades-long genocide of Native Americans that killed tens of thousands of people, parks staffers must decide how to deal with this state’s painful history around its Indigenous communities.

When Sharaya Souza, co-founder of the American Indian Cultural District in San Francisco, first heard about the changes made to the Muir Woods sticky notes exhibit, she was “sad but not surprised,” she said.

“They’re removing Post-it notes from a piece of history,” said Souza, who is Taos Pueblo, Ute and Kiowa — in addition to being of both Spanish and Brazilian heritage — and spoke to KQED on her own behalf and not for the organizations she works with. “That’s all we got: Post-it notes.”

In her role at AICD and her previous work with the California Native American Heritage Commission, Souza has long strived to protect Native cultural sites and heritage via an effort called “placekeeping:” “Letting people know the full history of what happened here. And yes, some of it was a hard history,” Souza said.

The state’s history of violence toward its Native communities has long gone ignored in California, but in recent years, many national parks across California have begun to acknowledge that brutal history in their programming or signage — even though Souza said there’s still a long way to go.

And tribes’ relationships with the parks haven’t always been smooth either, advocate Morning Star Gali said. A member of the Ajumawi band of the Pit River Tribe and the founder of Indigenous Justice, Gali is also the California Tribal and Community Liaison for the International Indian Treaty Council, coordinating the annual Sunrise Gathering for Alcatraz Island. She has been driving work to remove racist place names and add signage, particularly to NPS sites like Alcatraz, that acknowledge its Indigenous history.

Gali said that while staff and leadership at some parks have supported their efforts, many are limited in the changes they can make — and others have dragged their feet in allowing tribes to access and use their sacred land or have scrutinized their practices and religious expression.

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“Where do we go when we’re shut out of our sacred places?” she said. “Where do we go when we’re no longer allowed into both state and federal sites?”

Souza agreed: “We’ve kind of become the Indian in the Cupboard,” she said. “You take them out when you want to play with them.”

“But you put them back in the cupboard when it comes to actually elevating that truth-telling, and it’s out of some sort of fear that it’s going to increase ‘a sense of national shame,’” she said, referencing the language used in Trump’s executive order.

“I’m a little afraid of the direction that we are going,” Souza said. “That we’re going backwards from all the progress that we’ve made over the years.”

‘A white nationalist effort’

Another aspect of California history that many worry could be erased: the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

These events are commemorated at the National Park Service’s Manzanar National Historic Site in the Eastern Sierra, where around 11,000 people were incarcerated. Around the country, well over 100,000 people were imprisoned this way.

Survivors of Japanese American incarceration have been among the most vocal against the Trump administration’s detainment and deportation of immigrants, after the president used the same law deployed against them in the 1940s — the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — to attempt to deport Venezuelans being held at a Texas detention center.

Now, advocates are worried the history they’ve fought so hard to tell will be at risk once again. The story told at Manzanar is “a cautionary tale,” said Bruce Embrey, who co-chairs the Manzanar Committee that his mother, who was incarcerated at Manzanar, co-founded in 1970.

For Embrey, the signage review at parks like Manzanar is “a white nationalist effort to erase our history,” he said — and he believes that “if they cannot rewrite the narrative of the Smithsonian or Manzanar or the various sites around this country, they will close them.”

Lehnertz said it’s stories like those on display at Manzanar that are most needed in parks.

Replica camp barracks stand at Manzanar National Historic Site near Independence, California.

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“The United States does not put its history into secret boxes,” she said. “It shares its history openly, and that’s what makes America great, is our willingness to sometimes disagree.”

“And our willingness to commit resources to a rigorous understanding of history, even when it disagrees with our family’s experience of history,” she said.

An uncertain future

Regardless of the federal government’s final decisions, many staffers are worried about the degrading effect that any hasty revision of information will have on the parks — and on visitors.

Normally, the anonymous superintendent said, they would work with historians, biologists and other subject matter experts to help develop park signage.

Signs also have to be accessible — often featuring braille or sitting at wheelchair height — and parks staff will often consult with tribal communities or descendants of the historical figure they’re writing about. Parks advocates have even argued the changes demanded by the executive order violate their legal obligation to consult with tribes before making significant changes to parks.

“We’re talking millions of dollars here in terms of process and years of work to do a full exhibit, and the signage, and all the interpretive materials that go with,” former NPS leader Jarvis said.

In the absence of those funds, covered-up signs will likely become a familiar sight to visitors, said Jesse Chakrin, the executive director of Fund for People in Parks. Chakrin’s group works with small or lesser-known parks in the West on elements like signage that aren’t typically funded by federal dollars — “a long and slow process,” which can cost up to $5,000 for a single sign.

In an era of reduced staffing, Chakrin said, these signs “may be the only way that a visitor actually better understands the park location that they’re in.”

But Chakrin’s biggest concern is that even if no more sign removal orders ever materialize, the order is so broad — and the penalties so nebulous — that parks staff will simply self-censor out of fear of retribution.

“People will stop telling full and complete stories,” he said. “People will start to think about the ways that they can be careful so as to not offend.”

This puts parks staff in a moral quandary, Jarvis said, with many feeling the order runs counter to the park service’s mission “to tell these stories authentically and based on the best scholarship in science.”

“It’s essentially a violation of that responsibility,” he said.

Visitors speak up

Amid all this turmoil, staff and advocates say that visitors have yet to see the biggest effects of the orders. Nonprofit partners like “friends” groups have been backfilling a lot of public-facing roles, as have seasonal staff.

“Visitors aren’t really seeing the full impact because of this veneer, this facade, of keeping parks ‘open and accessible’,” the superintendent said — referring to another secretarial order that mandates parks keep functioning even amid severe staffing shortages.

“Meanwhile, everything on the back end is falling apart.”

One thing that might give parks staff solace: Across California, the federally mandated signs urging the public to join the review of parks signage have so far not borne much fruit for the Trump administration.

According to a copy of the public submissions received by California parks and provided to KQED by the National Parks Conservation Association, out of around 300 entries across the state’s national parks sites from June and July of this year, just four were elevated for review — all of which critiqued the Muir Woods “History Under Construction” exhibit.

A handful of others alerted parks staff to infrastructure issues with bathrooms or fading signs that need replacing. But nearly all of the rest of the submissions were either in praise of rangers and parks staff or offering complimentary views of existing signage.

And hundreds of public comments were submitted specifically in protest of the signage order — commending displays at parks that highlighted Indigenous history and climate change. Manzanar, especially, wrote one visitor, “is an example that the beauty and grandeur of our constitution can never be taken for granted,” making reference to the language of Trump’s executive order. Another comment about Yosemite urged parks staff to “continue to educate people about the Native Americans who were displaced in this area.”

Supporters line the walkway with signs spelling “Protect Our Park” during the National Parks Conservation Association’s Day of Action at Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California.

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Parks advocates said the results of the public submissions give them hope that, amid everything, park visitors see the value in telling the whole story of American history.

“History aims to improve the nation by learning the lessons of the past,” Lehnertz said. “And the openness of any individual American to learning that, in my experience, has been 99% to 1%.”

Or as Graves put it: “They’ve said over and over — ‘We want to know the whole truth. Don’t dumb down our history.’”