Last Tuesday, the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA)—an advocacy group supporting the National Park Service—filed suit with a coalition of other plaintiffs against the Trump administration for the removal of educational signs from national parks.
The suit alleges that Park Service units across the country were forced by an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” to scrub educational exhibits that appeared to challenge the administration’s views on topics like racism and climate change. That executive order granted Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgrum wide leverage to review signage on federal property suspected to “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology,” per its fine print.
That order, issued in late March of last year, is part of a sweeping program to scrub “woke ideology” and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs from government property—one that has led to some strange news stories, like the Department of Defense removing an online reference to the plane that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima at the close of World War II, presumably because the plane’s name (“Enola Gay”) contains the word “gay.”
Parks named in the suit include Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, which was asked to take down an exhibit telling the stories of enslaved people who lived in George Washington’s home and Fort Sumter, a park commemorating the start of the Civil War, which was asked to remove signage concerning sea level rise that threatens the park’s historical preservation efforts.
Big Bend National Park is not explicitly named in the suit, but the park did make national headlines late last month in a Washington Post article claiming that nearly 20 signs across the park were flagged for removal by the administration, including a number of bilingual signs that “talk about cooperating with Mexico on modern preservation efforts.” (The park has not independently confirmed to the Sentinel which signs were flagged for removal and whether they have actually been removed yet.)
NPCA Senior Director of Cultural Resources Alan Spears characterized the lawsuit as a fight “for the soul of our national parks” and criticized the Trump administration for what he felt was out-and-out censorship. “National parks serve as living classrooms for our country, where science and history come to life for visitors. Our parks are our common ground, unifying us in the stories of our past and the hope we collectively have for our future,” Spears wrote in a statement. “As Americans, we deserve national parks that tell stories of our country’s triumphs and heartbreaks alike. We can handle the truth.”