The National Park Service last month published 35,000 public comments submitted in response to a government request, asking visitors to report signs or displays they believe portrayed American history negatively.
The comments were submitted online and through QR codes at park sites, including nearly 7,000 from parks in the Mountain West.
To Gerry James, the deputy director of Sierra Club's Outdoors for All campaign, the responses showed widespread opposition to the Trump administration’s effort to review historical displays.
“I think that they were expecting people to be okay with this whitewashing of history,” he said. “A lot of folks called that out.”
The vast majority of visitors objected to what they saw as an attempt to downplay difficult chapters of American history.
“I think it is highly inappropriate to ask visitors to report ‘any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans,’” said one visitor to Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah. “Historical recounting should be factual regardless of whether a person may perceive them as positive or negative. I do not think the NPS should be addressing this at all.”
Others urged the Park Service to leave historical interpretations unchanged. At the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site in Colorado, one visitor asked the agency to keep a sign describing the location as a “massacre site.” In 1864, U.S. Army troops killed about 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho people there. Earlier signage had referred to the event as a “battleground.”
Many comments also expressed support for National Park Service employees or concern about staffing and budget cuts. Some included expletives or even poems.
The Mountain West News Bureau identified only a handful of comments in favor of efforts to revise or remove information at parks, most of which opposed what they viewed as "woke" historical displays highlighting racism or the subjugation of Indigenous people.
The Sierra Club said the release of the comments comes as it pursues a lawsuit against the Interior Department to access records related to the review. A leaked database published by the Washington Post identified sites under consideration for possible signage changes, but the agency has not publicly released documents detailing the effort.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between KUNC, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio, KJZZ in Arizona and NPR, with additional support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
