From slavery to pollution, National Park employees flagged material deemed 'disparaging' to US

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The Trump administration is reviewing material about slavery, the destruction of Native American culture, climate change and more at federal parks after employees flagged information that could be “disparaging” to Americans, according to screenshots shared with The Associated Press.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March directing the Interior Department — which manages parks, monuments and other designated land — to ensure public property doesn't contain elements that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living." Instead, it said to “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people” and “the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”

The National Park Service had until July 18 to flag “inappropriate” signs, exhibits and other material, according to a document shared with the AP by the National Parks Conservation Association, which obtained internal information from an anonymous source within the Interior Department. The public was also encouraged to participate.

“As we carry out this directive, we’ll be evaluating all signage in the park along with the public feedback we’ve received," said Elizabeth Peace, spokesperson for the Interior Department. “This effort reinforces our commitment to telling the full and accurate story of our nation’s past." The department said any signage inconsistent with the executive order will be removed or covered and reinstated once edits are made. The administration said it would remove all “inappropriate” material by Sept. 17, according to The New York Times, citing internal agency documents.

The directive has raised concerns about sanitizing and erasing dark sides of American history.

“Pretending that the bad stuff never happened is not going to make it go away," said Alan Spears, a senior director with the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonpartisan group separate from the national parks system that advocates for it. “We need to be able to talk about these things if we're going to have any hope of bringing people together."

A look at some of the material that was flagged for review:

WHAT'S IN DISPUTE: A sign titled “The Air We Breathe” was flagged because it discusses the importance of clean air. Pollution from human-caused ozone, it explains, threatens people's health and vegetation, and power plants, cars and industries that burn fossil fuels are the pollutant's primary sources.

In North Carolina's Cape Hatteras National Seashore, there are signs about sea level rise due to climate change. “We do not believe it to be in violation, but would like someone to review if messaging of climate change and sea level rise reduces the focus on the grandeur, beauty and abundance,” one employee wrote.

THE BACK STORY: Emissions from burning fossil fuels are heating the planet, causing ice sheets and glaciers to melt and seawater to expand. Rising seas threaten the people and ecosystems that live by the coast.

THE REACTION: Carlos Martinez, climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, thinks the agency should be educating the public about the threats national parks face.

These public parks are places to learn about pollution, climate change and environmental degradation, he said, and eliminating this information “limits the ability for our population, especially for the younger generation, to understand these issues that allow them to then take action.”

WHAT'S IN DISPUTE: At a gift shop in Charles Pinckney National Historic Site in South Carolina, marked for review were books for sale, including “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs. Similar books were flagged elsewhere, including at the Washington Monument, where someone identified a book discussing George Washington as a slave owner.

In Pennsylvania's Independence National Historical Park, flagged were descriptions of the whipping, kidnapping, rape and other brutality slaveholders inflicted on Black people. At another, an employee identified an exhibit about Black Americans escaping to freedom that names slave owners.

THE BACK STORY: The legacy of slavery and racism has laid the foundation for the inequalities Black people face in the U.S., including greater rates of poverty, disease and illness, and incarceration at more than five times the rate of white people.

THE REACTION: “Slavery is not a side story. It’s the engine of American economic growth for more than two centuries,” said Cedric Haynes, vice president of policy and legislative affairs with the NAACP. “And there are individuals who played a part in this.”

It's important to name the people who perpetuated slavery's atrocities, he said, because that legacy is embedded in American laws, institutions and the nation's wealth.

WHAT'S IN DISPUTE: At Sitka National Historical Park in Alaska, an employee flagged a panel about missionaries who sought to destroy the language and culture of Alaska Natives and forcefully remove them from their lands. The “concerning text” says: “The history of this land includes a series of actions that attempted to remove the Sheet’ka Kwaan from their land, culture, and language which includes forced relocations under both Russian and American governance.”

In Florida's Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, tagged was a panel discussing imprisonment of Plains Indians. “Text of panel needs review for language referring to tribes having choice of extinction or assimilation. Language of U.S. Government giving the ‘choice’ of extinction could be considered negative towards the United States," they wrote.

THE BACK STORY: “The relationship between the United States and Indigenous nations has been fraught, violent, dispossessive and complex over the centuries, and the national parks are part of that story,” said Jessica R. Cattelino, American Indian studies professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “To cut off parts of those stories because they might make someone uncomfortable, that’s a disservice to the ecological and cultural value of these lands.”

Brenda Child, a Red Lake Ojibwe tribe member and American and American Indian studies professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said it's only been about two decades since we started telling the accurate history of the United States and Native Americans.

THE REACTION: It's sad to think about efforts to rewrite it now, she says, at a time when more accurate portrayals of Indigenous history in the U.S. finally exist. "But the way I always look at these things is: You can try to suppress it, but the cat’s out of the bag. We know what happened. The books have been written.”

WHAT'S IN DISPUTE: Is Florida’s Everglades National Park a slight to industrial development in America? Stories of the lands’ urbanization, agriculture and more presented across the park “could be conceived as being disparaging to the development of Industrial America,” one employee wrote.

THE BACK STORY: The Everglades is a subtropical wilderness that protects 1.5 million acres of habitats and biodiversity and is a vital source of drinking water for millions. The Seminole and Miccosukee tribes have called these lands home for centuries.

Decades of urban and farming development degraded the ecosystem, until, in 1947, the park was established to protect what remained. Underway is a massive state-federal project, approved by Congress in 2000 with bipartisan support, that aims to undo the damages.

THE REACTION: People committed these harms “generations ago without knowing better. And we know better now, and we cannot lose sight of the lessons learned,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades. “If we don’t keep in clear view that history and the mistakes that we made in our past, then we are doomed to repeat them.”

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