June 18, 2025 08:34 AM UTC

The Political Erasure Of Sand Creek And Camp Amache Has Begun

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• by: Colorado Pols

Just before Memorial Day weekend, we took note of an order from Donald Trump’s new Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, directing national parks and monuments to remove interpretive signage and other materials that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” This order affects parks and historic sites related to slavery, the Civil War, wars against Native American populations, and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II just to name a few.

As the Colorado Sun’s Kevin Simpson reports today, last week two of Colorado’s most controversial historic sites, the Sand Creek Massacre memorial and the Camp Amache Japanese internment camp in the southeastern part of the state, put up signs asking visitors to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans.”

The signs went up on Friday at both the Amache site near the southeastern town of Granada that incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II and the Sand Creek Massacre site where U.S. troops killed hundreds of peaceful Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho in 1864 at their encampment near present-day Eads.

Park advocates and descendants of those who suffered in both of those historic moments have for months been wary that the current administration might try to reshape stories it deemed unflattering. President Trump issued an executive order in late March outlining a raft of measures designed to reverse what it contends has been a “revisionist movement” to cast portions of American history in a negative light…

“I interpret it as a direct threat to why we have national parks,” said Tracy Coppola, Colorado senior program manager for the southwest regional office of the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association, which advocates for parks’ preservation and improvement. “Definitely a chilling effect on our park rangers, whose job is to tell the story of these places. The Park Service is not partisan, and they represent all of us.”

Like we said when this news originally broke, honesty about American history is not incompatible with patriotism, and attempting to whitewash such unambiguously negative events in American history like the Sand Creek Massacre does a disservice to every American. It’s the acknowledgement of the mistakes made in American history and how we’ve remedied them that makes the victims of those mistakes whole, and allows them to be patriotic too.

Sadly, that honest dialogue about American history is not what the MAGA movement wants to have. What they want is a propagandized, sanitized version of history, primarily focused on not making white people uncomfortable. Even in a place like Sand Creek.

That is not an objective we will ever be able to embrace.