At Cadillac Mountain, a Missing Sign and the Fight Over What National Parks Should Tell

At the top of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park in Maine, visitors can watch the sun rise before anyone else in the continental United States. For thousands of years, the Wabanaki people have called this mountain sacred. But a sign explaining that history was recently removed — and now a court battle is underway over what stories America's national parks should be allowed to tell.

The sign taken down from Cadillac Mountain was one of about 30 markers removed from Acadia National Park. The removals happened after Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered national parks to get rid of materials that the Trump administration said were 'disparaging' — meaning harmful or disrespectful — to American history. Signs about climate change and the history of Native Americans were among those taken down across the country.

The Wabanaki people have lived in the northeastern part of North America for more than 10,000 years. Their confederacy — a group of five nations called the Maliseet, Mi'kmaq, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, and Abenaki — is known as 'the people of the dawnland.' They were the first known stewards, or caretakers, of the land that includes much of Acadia National Park today. The mountain the park sits on is called Wapuwoc in their language, which means 'white mountain of the first light.'

Maulian Bryant, the executive director of the Wabanaki Alliance, said the removed signs showed 'the good stuff' about her people's history and culture. She pointed out that the signs did not even cover the hardest parts of that history — like the fact that disease brought by settlers wiped out most of the Wabanaki population. 'If we really want to get into the real history, that's a whole other slice of cake,' she said. Getting the Wabanaki language and stories into parks had taken years of hard work, and Bryant said erasing it 'has big implications for how far we've come.'

Many of the signs that were removed had been created through years of teamwork between the park and outside groups. Organizations like Friends of Acadia, the Schoodic Institute, and the Native Plant Trust worked closely with citizens of the Wabanaki Nations to design these exhibits. Taking down those signs didn't just remove information — it also damaged the trust that had been built over many years between the park and the Wabanaki people.

A group of conservation, history, and science organizations filed a lawsuit in February to get the signs put back. Angelo Villagomez, from the Center for American Progress, was part of a team that studied a leaked government database. They found that one-third of all national parks had flagged — or marked for removal — exhibits about history or science, and that Black and Indigenous history were the most targeted. 'Some of it's been put back, and then some of it has been removed again,' Villagomez said.

The Interior Department did not answer questions from the Associated Press about the removals or the ongoing lawsuit. A National Park Service official named Joy Beasley reviewed the flagged materials, but wrote in a June statement that the records are 'unlikely to capture every removal, revision, or replacement.' This means it's hard to know the full picture of what has been changed across the country's parks. Todd Martin of the National Parks Conservation Association said parks are 'America's storytellers' and have a 'duty to preserve and interpret American history, the good, the bad, and the ugly.'

Jenny McBurney, a librarian at the University of Minnesota, started a project called Save Our Signs to encourage visitors to take photos of park signs before they disappear. She worries that people will visit parks thinking they're getting the full story of American history — and not realize they're only getting part of it. 'People are going to go to the parks and think that they will get to learn history there when in fact they will be learning an incomplete history,' she said.

Despite the removals, Wabanaki people and their partners have continued to share their culture at Acadia. The Abbe Museum, which is privately owned and largely overseen by Wabanaki people, works with the park to bring Native voices in through music, arts, and culture. Nick Bear and members of a Wabanaki drum circle perform on Cadillac Mountain every year as part of that effort. 'That's just like bringing those ceremonies right back to the original sites,' he said.

In July, a Passamaquoddy basket maker named Lydia Soctomah showed visitors how to make traditional Wabanaki baskets using pounded ash bark and sweetgrass. Both plants are part of the Wabanaki creation story. Soctomah, whose grandmother was also a well-known basket maker, said the craft carries deep meaning for her family and her people. 'Making a basket is worth 1,000 memories for me,' she said. 'I was always told it holds a part of your spirit.'

Access to sweetgrass has been hard for Wabanaki people for a long time, because they were pushed off coastal lands onto reservations. In 2017, scientist Suzanne Greenlaw — a citizen of the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians — led a study in Acadia to learn more about sweetgrass and help tribes get access to it again. That study helped build co-stewardship programs, which allow tribes to help care for natural resources on park lands.

By the end of the Biden administration, there were more than 400 co-stewardship agreements with tribes across the country, including programs at Acadia. Former National Park Service director Chuck Sams, who is himself a Native American, helped build many of those programs and watched some of his work get reversed. Though he is worried, he cautiously hopes for a 'rebuilding period' under the next administration. 'There are always ebbs and flows with every administration,' Sams said. 'Nobody has seen that more than American Indian tribes.'