This conversation aired in the July 31, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
An interpretive sign at Muir Woods National Monument has recently been edited because of a Trump administration executive order banning any materials that “inappropriately disparage” people in American history. This isn’t the first time that a national park exhibit in the Bay Area has been affected because of Trump’s policies.
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QA Transcript:
CROSSCURRENTS HOST HANA BABA: Tell me about this exhibit that was taken down.
REPORTER MARISSA ORTEGA-WELCH: So the exhibit actually builds on an older sign at Muir Woods. It looks like a typical interpretive sign you might see along a trail in a national park. The original sign has a timeline of the monument's founding.The first date on the timeline is 1872. That's the founding of the very first national park, Yellowstone. But in 2021, some park rangers were looking at this sign and they realized this timeline was leaving out a lot of information, like the Indigenous history of the area. Or the fact that the park was actually, in large part, founded by a grassroots group of women. Or the fact that some of the park's most prominent founders had ties to racist policies, like anti-Asian immigration laws.
HANA: That’s a lot of missing information. So then what did the park rangers do about that?
MARISSA: They decided that they wanted to add this missing information to the existing timeline. And they at first used literal sticky notes, and then they later upgraded to these more weather-resistant, more permanent stickers. And they called this updated exhibit: History Under Construction.I talked to one ranger who created the exhibit, Elizabeth Villano. She’s since left the Park Service.
ELIZABETH VILLANO: We thought it was really important that we left the original timeline intact. We didn't take a single date off, we didn't modify any of the events, but we started to layer in more history that had been left out.
HANA: So Marissa, why did they call it “History Under Construction”?
MARISSA: You know, when it first opened, the exhibit was literally wrapped with caution tape, like it was a construction site. And the rangers were really playing with this idea that the way we think about history changes throughout time. You know, what events we choose to highlight or information we choose to include changes, even from when the sign was first put up to now.
ELIZABETH: It was important to us that we made really clear that the facts of history are not under construction – we're not touching a single fact – but the way that we tell history is.
MARISSA: But on July 18th, the National Park Service, following an executive order, instructed Muir Woods to take the new information down. So if you visit Muir Wood's today, you'll just see the original timeline starting in 1872.
HANA: Okay, so did the National Park Service say why they made this order to change the sign back?
MARISSA: Well, this directive to change the sign is all part of an executive order that Trump issued back in March. The executive order is called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” And the order says all properties within the Department of the Interior, which includes national parks, cannot have any sign, exhibit, statue, et cetera, that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” And this order alleges that over the last decade, there's been this revisionist movement to cast American history in a negative light. So staff on the ground at national parks over the past couple of months have had to review all their exhibits, signs, the books that they sell at the gift shops for this inappropriate content. I talked to a ranger at a national park in Northern California about this. They're fearful of losing their job right now. So we’re keeping this person anonymous and we are using an actor instead of their real voice.
RANGER: I spent an entire week when I could have been providing information to the public, driving to every remote location in our vast national park, taking a picture of every sign in order to report them to the federal government for them to evaluate whether or not that information, which has been available to the public in some cases for decades, is quote-unquote appropriate for the American public to continue to receive. This is not an effective use of government resources or personnel time.
HANA: So Marissa, a question is, who gets to decide what's appropriate and what's not? What's the criteria here?
MARISSA: There's a committee at each national park that had to then review all the photos that this ranger took and decide which of its exhibits could be considered inappropriate and send those pictures up to the national level for further review.
I want to add that the public actually is able to weigh in on this, too. Part of the order also required national parks to post signs around their properties that encourage visitors to report any information that is “negative,” again, about “past or living Americans.” The sign has a website and a QR code links to a feedback form that you can fill out.
HANA: OK so then what happens now?
MARISSA: In mid-August, the National Park Service will then instruct these individual parks on what exhibits need to be changed. So the committee sent up their content to the national level for review and then now they're waiting to hear what needs to be changed.
HANA: But haven't parks already been making changes? For example, like Stonewall took out the word “transgender” from its website. This has been happening.
MARISSA: It has, and actually even here locally in the Bay Area...
A RANGER, MAKING AN ANNOUNCEMENT ON A MIC: Good morning, Rosie visitors. In about 5 minutes, at 10:30am, we’ll show our first film of the day. It’s called “Homefront Heroes”…
MARISSA: So I went to Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historic Park -- a mouthful of a name. It's in Richmond, California. It's this big, airy brick building – a former factory turned visitor center – right on the shoreline. You can see San Francisco across the Bay.
And I got a tour of it from historian Donna Graves. The Park Service contracted her over 25 years ago to help found this park. And the park tells the story of the work happening here in the U.S. during World War II. Because remember, during the war, a lot of people were sent overseas to fight, but there were also people that were put to work here to build things like ships for the war, including a lot of women. And that's where we get that image of Rosie the Riveter with her sleeve rolled up.
DONNA: The propaganda image of Rosie the Riveter was always a young, beautiful white woman. But what historians and people who live here in Richmond know is that Rosies – people who worked in defense industries – were everybody. They were people of all ages. They were women and men of all ethnicities and races.
MARISSA: But not everyone was treated the same. So there's a sign in the visitor center about how Black Americans faced housing discrimination during the war and a sign about how Japanese Americans were incarcerated after the Pearl Harbor bombing.
DONNA: What we tried to do with this visitor center was tell that broad, inclusive story.
MARISSA: The museum also includes an exhibit about LGBTQ people during World War II. Donna told me, as far as she knows, it was the first LGBTQ exhibit in a national park.
HANA: OK and then?
MARISSA: And then in January, Trump issued a bunch of executive orders, as we remember. One of them dismantled DEI programs. Another one was about gender. It said all federal documents could only refer to men and women. And so a Park Service staff person at Rosie the Riveter just took the exhibit down on their own. And Donna found out about it.
DONNA: I really wanted to verify it because it seemed crazy. And I was angry. This was something that represented many people's stories. And it was a story that had connected with so many visitors and been so meaningful to people whose stories have been erased or left out. And that made me angry.
MARISSA: So Donna learned that the staff person had likely been acting out of fear, worried that the park was gonna become a target because of this exhibit. So after community outcry, the exhibit went back up just a few days later, but it remains to be seen what's going to happen to this exhibit or any of the other exhibits. HANA: So they just put it back up?MARISSA: They just put it back up. It's there now, you can go see it, but given this newer executive order, requiring parks to review any negative or disparaging content, who knows what will happen to it in the future.
HANA: Now, all of this just makes you wonder how the parks around us that we love, how will they avoid telling “negative” history?
MARISSA: Yeah, I've been thinking of a place like Manzanar in the eastern Sierra of California, which tells the story of Japanese American incarceration during World War II. I mean, how does a national park like that or so many of the national parks in the South that tell the story of the Civil Rights Movement that was sparked because of racial discrimination – how are these parks going to be able to tell that history? It's unclear what's going to move forward. And what's interesting is that the National Park Service has actually been making a concerted effort over the last few decades to bring on new parks like that and to tell new stories as a way of bringing more people to the national parks. Those stories aren't always going to be entirely positive or easy to hear, but Donna says that's what the National Park Service is supposed to do.
DONNA: Among its charges in telling history is telling all American stories and also finding ways to make history relevant to people today.
MARISSA: And here's the former ranger Elizabeth Villano again, the one who helped create the Muir Woods exhibit.
Elizabeth: We really take censorship seriously in the National Park Service. We're bipartisan. We are legally mandated to tell all American stories. And so I don't get to pick whose stories I tell.
MARISSA: But Elizabeth says that's what the current administration is doing. By ordering this exhibit to be taken down, they are signalling to park rangers what histories can be told and which ones can't.
ELIZABETH: You can't say that the Coast Miwok, this is their Indigenous land. You can’t say that there was a grassroots movement of women that helped protect this forest. They are the ones rewriting history. They are ones taking the facts of history and constructing them in the narrative that they want. Constructing them in a narrative that serves them.
HANA: Have you talked to the Department of the Interior about all of this? What did they say?
MARISSA: The Department of the Interior said in a comment that it is committed to presenting a truthful and comprehensive account of American history.
But I have been talking with national park rangers, even superintendents all across the country. And they of course do not feel like that is what these orders are helping them do. They're feeling sad, angry, frustrated. They feel like as American storytellers, they are being told that they're doing their jobs wrong. Like the Northern California ranger who wants to stay anonymous, they're also feeling really uncomfortable making these changes. I mean, I said this earlier, but they feel like they are being complicit in whitewashing history.
RANGER: I continue to show up to work because I believe in connecting people with parks. And I want people to be able to safely experience nature. I want them to have a smiling face there to answer questions with humility and grace so that they can grow in their understanding of the world. Yet every day I go into work, I have to anticipate that I will receive a directive that goes against the very mission of the work that I do.
HANA: Marissa, you're gonna be keeping your eye on this and any other changes to public lands in your reporting. Thanks for bringing this to us.
MARISSA: Yeah, thank you, Hana.