At Redwood National and State Parks, staff flagged at least three books by California Native American authors for possible removal from visitor center shelves, responding to a Trump administration directive demanding content more uniformly “uplifting” about Americans.
The flagged titles weren’t obscure. They included “California Through Native Eyes,” “We Are Dancing for You,” and “We Are the Land.” The directive reportedly touched at least 17 national park sites across the country, pushing staff to pull or revise exhibits covering settlers’ mistreatment of Native peoples and the documented harms of climate change. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a policy.
Kerri Malloy, an assistant professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies at San José State University and an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe, wrote about the flagging for CalMatters in 2026, laying out the mechanics of what she called erasure repackaged as reform. “When truth becomes inconvenient, discomfort is recast as bias and removal is reframed as restoration,” Malloy wrote. She didn’t pull that framing from thin air. It matches the directive’s own language, which critics say weaponizes the idea of “restoration” to justify stripping Indigenous-authored accounts from public spaces.
California State Parks told Malloy that the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park visitor center, sitting inside the jointly managed unit, would follow state policy rather than federal content directives. That’s a meaningful commitment, as far as it goes. But Malloy’s piece notes that other visitor centers within the same Redwood complex, those under direct federal management, are “undergoing changes” to comply with Washington’s current demands. So the same national park has visitor centers operating under different standards depending on which agency controls the counter you’re standing at.
Redwood isn’t a typical federal property. It’s a co-managed unit where the California Department of Parks and Recreation and the National Park Service operate under a cooperative agreement that governs staffing and interpretation. That shared management isn’t just administrative trivia. It’s the lever California could use if state officials decide they want to draw a harder line.
There’s precedent for exactly that posture. California’s Executive Order N-15-19 commits the state to meaningful tribal consultation and a more complete historical record in how it tells its own story to the public. That’s not aspirational language. It’s a governance obligation. The question Malloy’s piece forces into the open is whether that obligation extends to co-managed federal spaces where California already has a seat at the table, or whether state leaders will accept a federal carve-out that swallows half the bookshelf.
Malloy’s argument doesn’t treat visitor centers as incidental. She’s right that they aren’t neutral retail environments. Roughly 19 million people visit national parks in California annually, and what those visitors find when they walk into an interpretive center shapes how they understand the land, its original inhabitants, and the history of what happened there. Pulling tribally authored books doesn’t erase that history. It just makes it harder for a family from Fresno or a school group from Sacramento to encounter it.
The National Park Service’s interpretation policies have historically emphasized accuracy and relevance, not uplift as a filter for what gets told. A directive that applies an “uplifting about Americans” test to book selections is a departure from that standard, and it’s one that falls hardest on the communities whose accounts have always had the least institutional backing.
“The state can’t pretend it doesn’t have a role here when it’s co-signing the staffing plan,” Malloy told CalMatters. California can set conditions for its own participation in co-managed units rather than treating federal content decisions as automatic.
The books at Redwood weren’t removed. They were flagged. That’s a distinction worth noting, but it’s not a reason to stand down. Flagging is how removal starts.