Members of the Trump administration have ordered National Park Service staff change or remove signs and exhibits at two NPS locations in Montana due to their focus on climate change and settlers’ treatment of Native Americans.
According to the Washington Post, which first reported on the latest orders on Tuesday, those orders went out to 17 NPS sites across the country, including Glacier National Park and Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana.
The orders follow an executive order President Donald Trump issued last year on “restoring truth and sanity to American history," The Daily Montanan reports.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum subsequently issued an order directing all agencies in the department to identify any changes on federal land since 2020 with documented reasoning and encouraging public participation in the process. Soon after, the U.S. Department of the Interior put up signs asking the public to submit feedback on any signs that “are negative about either past or living Americans, or fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.”
In Glacier, which routinely ranks as one of the top-10 most visited parks, documents reviewed by the Washington Post showed the federal government flagged several displays related to climate change, including:
- a brochure that shows “images of glaciers retreating and explains that human-caused climate change is a factor in their likely future disappearance.”
- A similarly-themed video that refers to disappearing glacier
- an informational display describing issues with air pollution in Glacier
Jeff Mow, former superintendent of Glacier National Park, said the park’s exhibit were planned and created based on locations, what types of visitors will see them and what questions they will likely have.
“With 100 years of experience and having hosted over 120 million visitors over that time, I trust that the park staff have developed these exhibits and their content based what our visitors want to know,” he told the Daily Montanan.
Online, Glacier National Park still has a robust section of its website dedicated to explaining the impacts of climate change in the park, including on visitation, air quality and various animals such as wolverines, pika and meltwater stoneflies.
A screenshot of the climate change section of the Glacier National Park website on Jan. 29, 2026. Sarah Lundstrum, the Glacier Program Manager with the National Parks Conservation Association, told the Daily Montanan any changes or removal of signage in the park is concerning.
“NPCA is against any effort by this administration to suppress truth, facts, and science at our national parks,” Lundstrum said. “Climate change is real, and we can see the impacts of it in Glacier. Unfortunately, the decisions we make today will have implications for generations of park visitors to come. Censoring signs, stories or people is against the very ideals our parks represent and a disservice to the American people, and the millions of visitors our parks welcome each year.”
The Washington Post also reported that at Little Bighorn National Monument, an exhibit that mentioned the United States breaking promises to Native Americans and describing how U.S.-run boarding schools for Indigenous children “violently erased cultural identities and language” were flagged as not compliant.
In an email to the Daily Montanan, an Interior spokesperson criticized recent news coverage of the issue, saying it has “inaccurately linked routine sign maintenance and interpretive updates,” to the administration’s orders.
“Some materials may be edited or replaced to provide broader context, others may remain unchanged, and some removals being cited publicly had nothing to do with SO 3431 at all,” the spokesperson wrote. “Claims that parks are erasing history or removing signs wholesale are inaccurate.”
The Interior spokesperson added that the federal orders were meant to “ensure parks tell the full and accurate story of American history, including subjects that were minimized or omitted under the last administration. That includes fully addressing slavery, the treatment of Native Americans, and other foundational chapters of our history, informed by current scholarship and expert review, not through a narrow ideological lens.”
Earlier this month, the federal government removed an exhibit on slavery at Independence Hall Historic Park in Philadelphia, which Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro called an attempt to “whitewash” history.
Additional changes across the Park Service have included information about climate change at Fort Sumter this month and Acadia National Park last fall, which led to backlash from Maine lawmakers.
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