Censoring Our History

We might not be able to do much about what is going on right now in America, but we can at least document it. Here’s a good essay on the censorship of the Park Service employee sign at Muir Woods National Monument that became the first target of the national censorship program coming from this administration.

So when I was at Muir Woods, we created a sign called “History Under Construction” that aimed to tell a complete story that invited people into the complex history of the place. We wanted to tell the true story of the woods in a way that helped people learn from the past, and apply those lessons towards a brighter future. Our goal was to make sure nothing on the original sign got erased, but to add in details so people could see the difference in how history was told, and how it can be expanded to include more narratives.

Despite this care not to erase history, here I am, watching history be erased. The Trump administration is actively censoring American history from the public, including by taking down the History Under Construction sign. I’m watching as the sign that we carefully constructed to tell a full version of the story gets taken down, preventing people from learning from the past to make a better future. And I think my story of how we got to this particular moment of history may be important in learning from how to move forward from it.

When I was working at Muir Woods, we noticed a sign in “Founders Grove” called “Saving Muir Woods”. It outlined the work of several key players in how the ancient redwood forest was saved from logging: William and Elizabeth Thatcher Kent, Gifford Pinchot, and Theodore Roosevelt. This sign included a timeline of the events that related to the preservation of Muir Woods. The very first date on this timeline was “1872, Yellowstone National Park established”.

To be clear, the sign talking about the preservation of the forest insinuated that the first date worth knowing in relation to Muir Woods was… the founding of a national park in Wyoming? When we began to look at the timeline, we realized how lopsided the story was, and just how many things were left out — and the patterns of histories that were consistently missing.

So what did it leave out? Well, the land is the ancestral home of the Coast Miwok. For time immemorial, they had been stewarding this land in ways that are crucial to the forest’s health and biodiversity. That was nowhere to be seen on the sign. It also omitted why the Coast Miwok people aren’t stewarding these lands anymore, and the ways in which Congress systematically excluded Indigenous stewards and conducted a cultural genocide.

It left out the fact that the first movement to mobilize to save Muir Woods was spearheaded by women. In 1904, four years before Muir Woods became a National Monument, the Marin Journal published an article saying, “the women of San Francisco have so willed. They will preserve the grove. They want to create a park In the picturesque canyon that shall particularly be for the edification of the people of this city”. Instead of crediting this grassroots movement, the sign only acknowledged the work of Kent, Pinchot, Roosevelt, and Muir.

Rangers are the nation’s history keepers, its storytellers. And our job is to tell an unbiased, complete version of history. We tell the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between.

So when we made “History Under Construction”, that was our goal. We stated clearly- the facts of history aren’t under construction, but the way we tell them are. We were careful not to take away anything from the original sign, but only to add more nuance and complexity into it. And then we carved out spaces for people to discuss, share, and learn from each other. We wanted people to be able to compare the two timelines side by side, and be able to see what an incomplete version of the story looked like, and what it might look like to expand it. Most of all, we wanted people to see themselves in the story and understand that history isn’t ever black and white, it’s complicated.

So, I have one more date to add to the timeline: 2025. Here we are in the future. History Under Construction was taken down due to secretarial order 3431, to “Restore Truth and Sanity to American History”, which tells the NPS to remove any signage in National Parks that “disparages Americans”. Never mind that the story told by the updated sign was truer than the incomplete version.

Truth is not the goal here of course.

It’s a hard time to be a historian. Hell, it’s a hard time to be an American, as you all know. I don’t really know what to do except to tell the truth, whatever that leads to. Someday, maybe enough Americans will care about human values that we can turn this back. Or maybe they won’t. But we still have our stories and we can still tell them in the best ways that are allowed.