No Longer Circling the Wagons: Many National Parks Get Indian Stories Wrong

...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. A sign at the Bailly homestead explains that he bought beaver furs and other items from the Potawatomi in exchange for various trade goods. Another sign says the United States gave Bailly $6,000 for counseling the Potawatomi when they sold their land in the Chicago Treaty of 1833. That was a huge sum of money back then, but the sign doesn’t say what he did in those negotiations that made the U.S. government so grateful. Nor does the sign finish the story—the Potawatomi ended up on a “Trail of Death” westward, across the Mississippi....