Kansans can help document national park histories before they’re erased
The Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park in Topeka on May 18, 2024. (Cuyler Dunn for Kansas Reflector)
A directive from the Trump administration has many worrying: What will happen during the next few weeks to the history on display at the five Kansas locations managed by the National Park Service?
The concern stems from a March executive order from President Donald Trump and a subsequent order from his director of the Interior, Doug Burgum. Brace yourself for vertigo if you read them both in one sitting.
Trump and Burgum (or whoever wrote on their behalf) swirl legalese and political buzzwords into an Orwellian toxic stew: phrases like “any other measures” and “shall be implemented” mixed with “our extraordinary heritage” and “divisive narratives.”
The writing is half campaign press release, half authoritarian playbook — or perhaps I am being nostalgic by separating the two.
In substance, the orders instruct federal workers to swiftly whitewash America’s past at its most significant historical locations.
Most urgently, Burgum’s May 20 order requires park service employees to review properties for “inappropriate content” and potentially change “images, descriptions, depictions, messages, narratives or other information (content) that inappropriately disparages Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times).”
The bottom-line goal? To remove “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features” by Sept. 17.
The National Park Service seems all tied in knots. Its website offers a very unTrumpian line: “Some history hurts and some heals, but all of it can surprise and inspire us.”
A group of university librarians and data researchers aims to preserve these National Park Service signs. Using a website called Save Our Signs, the five project leaders are asking for digital photos documenting each park’s exhibits and signage, including here in Kansas.
Visitors to national preserves, parks and sites are sending images to the website to compile a history that the federal government might soon alter.
Locations that have been photographed appear as green dots on the “Save Our Signs” map, contrasting the gray un-photographed locations.
Here in Kansas, three of the five National Park Service locations have not yet been documented at all. We can change those gray dots to green before the history itself gets changed.
Save Our Signs does not yet have images for:
- Fort Larned National Historical Site
- Nicodemus National Historical Site
- Fort Scott National Historical Site
Visitors have already uploaded 35 images from the Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park in Topeka and one image from Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve.
Time is running out for Kansans to turn all five locations into green dots.
Call it hobbyist photography. Call it political activism. Call it your chore for the resistances. Regardless, we Kansans can get this done.
Molly Blake, one of the university librarians who created the national database of images, said in an interview that Save Our Signs will publish the submitted images on Oct. 13. They will first confirm the images’ authenticity and also ensure the privacy of people who appear in the images.
“Our goal is to preserve all the signs as they are right now, so that we have a record of them, and so members of the general public can see these signs that were created by taxpayer money, created by civil servants in the National Park Service with the intention of helping the public understand the historical significance of these sites,” Blake said.
The people who maintain the Save Our Signs website aren’t saying the signs are perfect, Blake said.
“We know they were created over a number of years, and people might take pictures of a sign that maybe they have a critique about or think it doesn’t tell the full history,” Blake said. “We’re not asking people to pass judgment on the signs. We invite them to think critically about the signs.”
The focus has been on signage because at least one exhibit, according to the New York Times, already has been altered in Muir Woods National Monument in California.
Consider the folly of presenting American history in the halcyon way that Trump and Burgum describe.
It would be nice to have a country built exclusively on the “greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people,” as Burgum instructs. Trump’s executive order targets any content that might “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (…) and instead focuses on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”
Blake sees the absurdity in these orders, and I agree.
“We all know that actual American history encompasses everything that happened and how all communities experienced it,” Blake said. “And people have the right to access that information. I think something that’s especially insidious about the secretarial order is that there’s obviously no shared definition of what it means to be disparaging.”
This MAGA historical naivete has been exposed, particularly here in Kansas, where our National Park Service sites are significant because — not in spite of — of their contentious histories.
Yes, President Trump, the Brown v. Board of Education park is an uplifting testament to the grit and courage of Kansas school children.
But it also doesn’t exist without violent, white American racism that kept Black children out of certain schools. At the Brown v. Board of Education park, the Trump-inspired makeover would need to be more extreme than removing a few signs. How can you create a museum that is wholly “solemn and uplifting” when it documents how Black school children were required to fight for their right to an equal education — an injustice that defined American life for hundreds of years, starting in the colonies?
Yes, the Nicodemus settlement in Kansas documents the Christian faith of Americans searching for and finding their “Promised Land.” But it also stands as living proof of formerly enslaved Black people migrating north, away from the Jim Crow laws of the South. The community of Nicodemus doesn’t exist without racist hostility of Reconstruction following the Civil War.
And yes, Fort Larned documents the lives of 19th century American soldiers. But our government built Fort Larned to manage escalating conflicts with Native American tribes that U.S. Army muskets displaced. As the National Park Service’s own website says (for the moment, at least), forts like Larned were “a place where Army troops in the area fighting Indians could get supplies and rest.”
This violent, racist and aggressive past is our history, as Americans and Kansans. Chasing down signs won’t change that.
Scrubbing these Kansas sites until they are squeaky clean would effectively erase them. And vanishing these American stories certainly seems like the administration’s goal.
Instead of a simplified and censored history, our Kansas sites and their visitors deserve an honest, complicated American narrative — if only for the next few days.