"National parks are America’s great outdoor classrooms, and they attract about 300 million visitors a year, from school groups to senior citizens, mountain climbers to families in minivans. The vast majority of those people will flip through the park’s brochure, browse exhibits at in the visitor center, and read some of the informational signs posted at the roadside turnouts. The more organized or ambitious of the visitors perhaps even checked out the park’s website before they came. In all those venues the National Park Service (NPS) interprets the site for visitors, teaching them about the park and why it is important.

That adds up to a lot of history, a lot of stories. There are stories about the American Revolution in Boston and Philadelphia, about the Confederacy on Civil War battlefields, about segregation along the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, about pioneers and Indians along the monuments to Western Expansion. The parks that preserve wild nature, such as Yellowstone, Yosemite or the Everglades, also tell a lot of historical stories. Even a national recreational area or seashore like Lake Mead or Fire Island will interpret the area’s history for visitors on their way to those beaches.

Because American Indians lived everywhere in this country, the NPS could tell Native stories at almost every site. After all, it has chosen to tell the stories of settlers at most park units. Unfortunately, the NPS usually leaves out the Native stories in the parks, letting Indians vanish from most park landscapes.

Too much of the NPS’s interpretation of our history is incomplete, and it usually leaves out the Native stories. And when it does tell a Native story, all too often, it is through the eyes of other people, the way it has been done it in too many movies. In Dances With Wolves, for example, Kevin Costner portrays the Lakota sympathetically, but through the eyes of a white military man who falls in love with a white woman who had been adopted by the tribe. A less benign example of that can be found at Indiana Dunes National Seashore, which tells of the Potawatomi tribe through the experiences of a white man, Joseph Bailly."

Get the Story:
Robert Pahre: No Longer Circling the Wagons: Many National Parks Get Indian Stories Wrong (Indian Country Today 8/29)