Park rangers across the country are reporting to National Park Service leadership the ways their roadside signs, museums exhibits and websites could be viewed as negatively portraying U.S. history or failing to focus visitors on the splendor of public lands.
The suggestions — including potential edits — were ordered by the Trump administration, which wants to overhaul how American history is told at national parks and federally run museums.
The internal documents viewed by POLITICO’s E&E News show how people on the front lines of telling those stories are dealing with a mandate from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to not provide content that “inappropriately disparages” historical figures and to emphasize the beauty of natural landscapes.
Park personnel are grappling with how to tell stories about enslavement or the oppression of Native Americans without implicating the white Americans of those eras, as well as expressing uncertainty over whether describing the effects of climate change would diminish the “grandeur” of public lands in some visitors’ eyes, according to about a dozen documents submitted to an NPS online portal.
