Right to Truth

The National Park Service has been coerced into removing information detailing a Native American massacre from Grand Teton National Park (Quinn & Pessoa). The murder of 173 members of the Piegan Blackfeet tribe was detailed on a plaque within an exhibit to American 19th-century explorer Gustavus Cheyney Doane. The piece sought to acknowledge and inform visitors to the park about the atrocities committed on its soil and America’s role in such acts, so that those massacred innocents may find the respect and appreciation in death that they never got in life. The removal of the plaque marks just another stepping stone in the Trump Administration’s crusade against “divisive narratives” (The White House).

Indeed, this is far from an outlier in Donald Trump’s America. The Administration has tasked the National Park Service with the removal or alteration of any information on Federal land that could appear to cast America’s history in a negative light (The White House). So, when employees in the National Park Service read the plaque in Doane’s exhibit, it set off alarms about depicting the United States as, in any way, flawed. The exhibit was then immediately remedied to remove all description of Doane’s role in the massacre of 173 innocent individuals, preventing “revisionist ideology” from tainting idolization of an American hero.

The actions taken here should not be a surprise to any American citizen, as this is part of a much larger sweep across all national parks and federal monuments. With that in mind, however, the underfunded and understaffed National Park Service is now tasked with going through literal thousands of flagged pieces to be rewritten and censored, without any clear picture of what the Administration wants out. The situation has gotten so drastic, and pressure from the White House has been so severe, that employees have confessed to plugging flagged documents from their database into ChatGPT and asking it to identify “divisive” material. This slash-and-burn style of censorship is plowing its way through federal monuments and exhibits, removing real history and facts for the purposes of MAGA ideology at a terrifying speed, and with no definite way to slow it down.

Author’s Note: I believe that this example details the tremendous idolatry of the Trump Administration’s stance on American history. Doane, this 19th-century American explorer, has an entire exhibit in Grand Teton National Park, and this massacre of innocent Native American people was hardly a footnote, just a plaque to give at least some form of recognition and respect to the lives lost. Yet, simply because it implicated a white American man and highlighted a genuine blemish of American westward expansion, the Trump Administration needed it stricken from the record. Indeed, the incredible glorification of all things white and privileged is a slap in the face to any true lover of this nation. I believe that it is only through a candid appreciation of the past that we will be able to move forward in the future, and the childish flattening of all tragedy from the great American story disparages real minorities and makes this nation’s foundations weaker. In true Trump hypocrisy, its attempts to remove partisan ideology from the National Parks have only imposed it, and it will take the people of America uniting as a majority to set it right.
– Jack Mattiacci