As the philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It’s true that we humans easily forget the past, and we seem to repeat our mistakes – think of large and small conflicts around the globe. Yet now the Trump administration is moving that process forward with a brand-new spin.
In response to President Donald Trump’s executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued an order to counter what he calls a revisionist movement that “seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”
Now, to comply with Burgum’s plan to eliminate any “negative” depictions of U.S. history, the Interior Department has asked national parks and other public land agencies to remove, cover or replace all noncomplying signs.
This could take some doing, as rewriting the past to remove conflict requires not just artfulness, but ignoring important people and their actions.
There’s also the issue of the very purpose of national parks and monuments. Parks and other public lands are the commons that belong to all Americans, and the National Park Service is charged with preserving these places and their backgrounds for the public. That means including the stories that might reveal bigotry and cruelty.
Think of the national places dedicated to the dark history of slavery and the struggle for civil rights, the migrant farmworkers movement, the coal miners’ labor movement, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, Japanese internment camps and sites of massacres of tribal members.
How can park rangers tell a happy story about eastern Colorado’s Amache National Historic Site, where thousands of Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II – never charged with any crime but treated as suspicious solely because of their Japanese roots? They were deprived of their homes and businesses and sent to live in primitive barracks across America. That shameful story is the truth.
At the nearby Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site in southeast Colorado, about 270 Cheyene and Arapaho people – mostly women and children – were slaughtered by a well-armed white militia in 1874. According to Congress’ Joint Committee on the Conduct of War, the attack was a “foul and dastardly massacre ... a cowardly act.” These blunt words present a problem for the rewriters of history. Is there a way for the Interior Department’s new historians to make a slaughter sound positive?
Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, established in 2016, was conceived by a coalition of five tribes to protect their cultural and sacred landscape and to establish a new model for tribal co-stewardship with federal agencies. In part, this was a long overdue recognition that all Western public lands once belonged to Indigenous tribes. Trump, who shrunk the monument by 85% before it was restored by President Joe Biden, is proposing to again alter the monument’s size. How do you tell a positive story without mentioning the long struggle of tribal people to become involved in managing the land that once was theirs?
The administration’s executive order could be interpreted as a hostile act against Americans who share some ugly history in our past. It also blocks Americans, young and old, who are eager to learn about this country’s history – no matter how many revelations there are of pain and cruelty.
Erasing the past from parks and monuments violates the law and generations of regulations and public tradition, and it also insults the people who suffered from that history. The freedom to learn our history – all of our history – is an important part of being a citizen of this country.
Here’s a suggestion: If you visit a national monument or park this summer and encounter sanitized history being communicated, take issue with it. You can tell the Interior Department that you expected a truthful account, not something that reads like propaganda. And if there’s no sign or interpretation conveyed at all, you might ask why it has been banished.
The past might not be pretty, but what occurred is called history, and it’s important that we learn what we hope never to repeat.
Ernie Atencio is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about the West. He lives in New Mexico and is a former national park ranger and former Southwest regional director for National Parks Conservation Association.
