The Government Is Erasing History From National Parks

Corruption of Power GriftMatrix

A leaked database reveals exactly which exhibits they’re targeting – and they’re threatening the employees who exposed it.

Someone at the Department of the Interior just leaked the censorship spreadsheet.

After Trump signed an executive order last year directing national parks to scrub anything “negative” about America from their signs, exhibits, and brochures, the Interior Department set up an internal system where park staff had to submit every piece of educational material that might be a problem. Films, waysides, Junior Ranger booklets, visitor center exhibits – all of it, logged into a SharePoint survey with descriptions of what the issue was and whether it needed to be revised or removed.

880 entries from parks across the country. 542 of them flagged.

This week, someone posted the whole thing anonymously on the Internet Archive with a note that said, “This data belongs to the American people, who need to know what is being done in their name.”

The Interior Department’s response was not to explain what’s in it. It was to say the employees who leaked it “will be held accountable.”

I went through it. And what jumped out isn’t just that they’re censoring history. It’s whose history they’re censoring.

At Kingsley Plantation in Florida, staff described exhibit panels showing the torture of enslaved women, artifacts like ankle racks, images of enslaved women having their children forcibly removed, and images of enslaved men and children in chains. The plantation’s entire purpose is to interpret the history of slavery in Florida. The submission asks whether they’re allowed to do the thing the site exists to do.

At Fort Raleigh, the entire Freedom Trail was submitted for review – a program about slavery and the Freedman’s Colony that won the Park Service’s regional Freeman Tilden Award in 2024 for excellence in interpretation. A year ago, they gave it their highest honor. Now they want to know if it’s allowed to exist.

At Gulf Islands National Seashore, the flagged waysides read like a table of contents for Black American history: Built By Slaves, United States Color Troops, South on the Underground Railroad, Jim Crow and Segregation. Every single one flagged as potentially “disparaging.”

At Stones River National Battlefield in Tennessee, staff flagged an exhibit panel because it describes slavery as the primary cause of the Civil War. Their note says this is “both historically correct and legislatively mandated” but they’re asking for confirmation that stating a historical fact is still allowed. Nine separate exhibit panels at that park were submitted, each one noting that they’ve received no negative feedback since installation in 2004. Twenty years. Zero complaints. And now someone has to check whether “emancipation” is too disparaging for a Civil War battlefield.

At Christiansted in the U.S. Virgin Islands, staff flagged a National Geographic film made with the Smithsonian Museum of African American History about an underwater slave ship wreck. They flagged the park’s brochure because it “discusses enslavement many times.” They flagged four panels about Alexander Hamilton’s youth because describing his mother being imprisoned for being a “woman of ill-repute” might be disparaging of a Founding Father. They flagged a children’s activity book because it discusses how colonization impacted Indigenous peoples. They flagged three waysides about slavery and the sugar industry. At one park. On one island. Every single exhibit about the lives of enslaved people and colonized people flagged as a potential problem.

At Little Bighorn Battlefield, staff ran their new exhibit text through ChatGPT to check for compliance. They flagged “The United States was hungry for land and gold” and “the US Government implemented harsher policies and broke more promises.” They offered to change those words if the review board finds them too subjective. Documented treaty violations at a battlefield where those violations led to a massacre. Potentially too much opinion.

At Castillo de San Marcos in Florida, a brochure was flagged because it was written by the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes about the imprisonment of their warriors and leaders at the fort between 1875 and 1878. The text was authored by tribal partners to share their own perspective on their own history at a site where their own people were imprisoned. That’s what’s under review. Whether a Native nation gets to tell their own story at the place where the United States locked them up.

At Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, a newly installed wayside was flagged for the sentence “Despite colonization and forced removal from their homeland, their connection with this place endures.” One sentence acknowledging that Indigenous people were here first and were forced out. That’s the thing they want removed.

At Theodore Roosevelt Island in Washington, D.C., a tribal land acknowledgement was flagged. The database records: “Decision was conveyed to remove. Removed on 7/2/2025.” Already gone.

At Pipe Spring National Monument, staff noted the cultural museum is jointly managed with the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, sits entirely on the Kaibab Paiute Reservation, and any changes must be made in conjunction with the tribe. They’re flagging that the administration’s order might force them to alter a museum that belongs to a sovereign nation.

At Fort Matanzas, a book in the gift shop was flagged because it contains the phrase “white American hostility” in a section about Sitting Bull and Tecumseh. A history book for sale. In a gift shop. At a national monument. Because it used the word “hostility” next to the word “white.”

This is the pattern. Slavery exhibits at plantations. Civil rights materials in the Southeast. Indigenous history at sites of forced removal. Black history at Civil War battlefields. Native voices at the very places where the government imprisoned them.

The order says “Americans past or living” but the Americans whose stories keep getting flagged are Black, Indigenous, and colonized people. The Americans who get protected from “disparagement” are the ones who did the enslaving, the removing, and the colonizing.

And then there’s the rest of it, the stuff that makes the whole project even more unhinged.

At Cape Hatteras, a Junior Ranger booklet was flagged because Activity 14 asks kids to learn about women pirates who dressed like men. At the same park, a lighthouse brochure was flagged because the discussion of Hurricane Dorian might not support “grandeur, beauty and abundance.” At Biscayne, a sign about trash washing up on beaches got flagged because marine debris isn’t grand enough. At Great Smoky Mountains, multiple signs about air pollution were submitted because explaining that coal-fired power plants have worsened the famous haze is apparently too negative. At another Cape Hatteras site, staff asked whether describing a failed lighthouse built by Congress counts as “disparaging of Congress.”

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, the National Park Service sent employees with crowbars to pry 34 educational panels about enslaved people off the walls at the President’s House Site, where George Washington actually kept enslaved people while serving as president. Only the names of nine enslaved people – Austin, Paris, Hercules, Richmond, Giles, Moll, Joe, Christopher Sheels, and Ona Judge – remained engraved in concrete after the panels came down.

The city sued. U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe, a George W. Bush appointee, opened her ruling by quoting Orwell’s 1984 and compared the administration to the Ministry of Truth. She ordered everything restored. An NPS employee told the mayor while reinstalling the panels, “It’s our honor. We’re all in the same boat here.”

The Interior Department is appealing.

The order talks about “grandeur” and “beauty” and “sanity.” But the spreadsheet tells the real story. The people being erased are the people who were already erased once – by the systems that enslaved them, removed them, colonized them, and segregated them. The national parks were one of the few places in this country where their stories were finally being told with federal resources and institutional commitment. And now a man who signed an executive order about “truth” is using it to make those stories disappear again.

There are 433 sites in the national park system. More than two-thirds exist to preserve and interpret American history. Right now, the people who run those parks are filling out spreadsheets asking permission to mention slavery at a plantation, colonization at a battlefield, and forced removal on Indigenous land.

The administration’s position is that telling those stories is “disparaging.”

The actual word for what they’re doing is something else entirely.

Sources