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- By Levi Rickert
Opinion. The Trail of Tears National Historic Trail spans nine states and traces thousands of miles across both land and water routes.
In 1838 and 1839, more than 16,000 Cherokee men, women and children were forcibly removed from their ancestral homeland in the southern Appalachian Mountains. They were first confined in stockades and internment camps, then compelled to walk hundreds of miles to Indian Territory — what is now Oklahoma. The forced migration, marked by extreme hardship, led to widespread illness, desertion and the deaths of thousands of Native people.
The history isn’t pretty, but it is factual. It is not simply Native American history — it is American history.
The Trail of Tears National Historic Trail was established to preserve this tragic chapter in American history, honoring the routes taken and protecting the sites that commemorate the Cherokees’ forced migration.
Some of the markings that tell the history of the Trail of Tears may be at risk because of Executive Order 14253, signed by President Donald Trump on March 27, 2025. The executive order — titled “Restoring Truth And Sanity to American History” — is a sweeping policy aimed at removing what the administration calls “disparaging” or “divisive” signs, plaques, and markers on federal lands, including national parks and public monuments. Couched in language about “highlighting the beauty of the American landscape,” it’s part of the administration’s broad political attempt to sanitize U.S. history for a new generation.
For Cherokee Nation Principal Chuck Hoskin, Jr., this executive order is not about truth.
Hoskin explained that if federal officials follow the executive order's requirements to identify sites that portray the United States negatively, the Trail of Tears would qualify — given that it involves the government rounding up people into stockades and forcing them on a deadly march across the country.
“If you take their dictate to its logical conclusion, then we can't talk about the Trail of Tears. And that's just wrong,” Chief Hoskin told me on Thursday in Washington, D.C.
Hoskin called the potential impact “a disservice” and believes tribal leaders need to engage directly with the Trump administration. He thinks federal officials would listen if tribes explained how the directive could result in one of the darkest chapters of American history getting pushed aside or whitewashed.
“I think they'll say, ‘You know what? We didn't intend for that to happen,’” Hoskin said. “We have to speak out when we can.”
What Chief Hoskin is referring to is tribal consultation. I hope there will be tribal consultation on this issue so that tribes can have their say about the federal government whitewashing history.
Many of the stories told on signs, markers, and plaques across this country are already incomplete. Most parks barely scratch the surface when it comes to telling the full story of Native presence on this land. Where our stories do appear — on interpretive panels at massacre sites, in exhibits recounting broken treaties, or on plaques explaining the displacement of our ancestors — they are the result of long, hard fights by tribal nations, historians, and allies demanding a sliver of justice through public memory.
Now, even those hard-won stories are under threat.
This executive order is a political act. It claims to promote “unity,” but it does so by denying hard truths. It promotes “patriotism,” but by silencing voices that challenge the mythology of American exceptionalism. It says it wants to “restore history,” but what it really aims to do is rewrite it — again — in the image of the colonizer.
We’ve seen this tactic before. In the boarding schools that tried to “kill the Indian and save the man.” In the textbooks that described Native peoples as “vanished.” In the maps that renamed our rivers, our hills, our homelands. This is not new. But it is dangerous.
When you remove the sign that tells the story of the Trail of Tears from a national park, what are you doing? You are not promoting unity — you are covering up a forced death march.
When you edit a plaque to downplay a massacre at Sand Creek or Wounded Knee, you are not healing — you are erasing. You are telling future generations that Native pain does not matter, that Native survival is an inconvenient footnote and that Native memory can be negotiated.
As a tribal citizen and a journalist, I’ve walked the lands where signs now stand — faint attempts to acknowledge the blood spilled, the lives lost, the cultures shattered. These markers are not perfect. But they are needed. They say: “We were here.” They say: “This happened.” They say: “Remember.”
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, under orders from the White House, has already begun reviewing park signage deemed too “negative.” Rangers have been told to report anything that paints “Americans past or present” in a bad light. But who decides what is negative? And more importantly — whose America are we talking about?
For Native peoples, America has always been a paradox. A land we love — and a government that has tried to erase us from it. We are Americans, yes. But we are also sovereign peoples. And our history — our true history — cannot be edited away for the comfort of tourists or politicians.
Hoskin is correct: tribal consultation is required before any sign should be taken down.
America deserves the truth.
Thayék gde nwéndëmen - We are all related.
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