Protecting national parks is about more than just saving waterfalls, mountains or big brown bears. It’s about safeguarding stories, people and democracy itself. That was the resounding sentiment at a 109th birthday celebration for the National Park Service at Richmond’s Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park.
More than 150 people gathered on Monday to protest the Trump Administration’s attacks on the National Park Service and celebrate what the parks have offered the country for more than a century. The local birthday event (part of a national Day of Action) was organized by East Bay historian Donna Graves, who has worked to develop the Rosie park since its inception 25 years ago. Local elected officials, organizations and advocates attended the event.
“We come together to celebrate, but also to defend,” Graves said. “Our parks are beloved living classrooms. When you erase history, you erase possibilities for our shared future.”
The National Park Service, which preserves and manages the natural and cultural resources of the national park system and other federal properties, has faced unprecedented threats since Trump took office. The administration has fired park and forest rangers, proposed nearly $1 billion in funding cuts that could relinquish federal control of some parks.
Richmond’s park has so far avoided layoffs, but other impacts are still felt.
Over the summer, the Department of the Interior (DOI) asked all National Parks to post signs with a QR code linking to a site where respondents can post their concerns about a variety of things, including whether they have “identified … any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans.”
The survey is part of President Donald Trump’s March 27 Executive Order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, ” NPR reported. But park advocates such as Graves said it’s an attack on democracy and truth.
“This park stands in sharp contrast to the oversimplified and whitewashed version of U.S. history that the current administration is demanding from the Park Service,” Graves said to the crowd. “Here in Richmond, the stories of many communities are illuminated, because the only way to tell the history of such a big and complex nation is through multiple perspectives.”
Neal Desai, senior pacific regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association, said the attacks are not partisan, but “extremist.”
“These places that we love, like Rosie here, they didn’t happen just because … and they could just as easily go away if we don’t show up in their time of need,” Desai said in his speech. “That time of need is now.”
Part of these changes are because Trump’s team hopes to expand mining, drilling and logging at these sites, some advocates argue.
Former National Park Services Director Jon Jarvis, who sat at the helm of the federal agency for more than 40 years, said the attacks are because Trump and his “ideologues” don’t have a clue what the agency does.
“Not only do they not know, they don’t care,” Jarvis told Richmondside. “It’s heartbreaking in many ways, but I’m a believer in the resiliency of our country and the people that come out and stand up.”
Jarvis, who spoke at Monday’s event, noted that last year 331 million people (roughly the population of the United States) visited the parks and the park service generated $55.6 billion in revenue. The National Park Service also provided 415,000 jobs nationwide.
But above all, the parks have instilled feelings of pride in local communities and captured the history of the country through multiple perspectives.
The Rosie the Riveter park, for example, tells the complete story of the World War II home front — how workers flocked to the Richmond shipyards in search of better paying jobs, pulling families out of the Great Depression and contributing to the war effort; how innovations in ship building earned Richmond the title of “Purple Heart” city; and how thousands of LGBTQ people who came for jobs or passed through in the military found solace in the small but thriving queer community in the Bay Area.
It also tells the stories of how members of the newly formed Richmond NAACP fought housing discrimination, “and it bears witness to the unjust incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans from across the West Coast and here in the East Bay,” Graves said.
“The home front era is full of connections to challenges we face right now, like how we provide housing and health care to everyone, how we come together during times of crisis, how we learn from our mistakes,” Graves said. “How we steward the resources that power our society and how we forge a more just and democratic future.”
Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia told the crowd Monday, “We can learn about how a shift in gender roles challenged traditional views of women’s abilities and paved the way for expanded opportunities for women after the war … (as well as) the struggles of Black, Latino, Asian, indigenous, disabled and others, gay and lesbian, the residents and workers who fought discrimination during the home front.”
Gioia said preserving the stories is critical so communities can learn from injustices and be prepared to fight against them when they show up again.
Flora Ninomiya, who was incarcerated with her Japanese American family during WWII, said the harmful rhetoric used to justify Japanese internment in the 1940s is all too similar to rhetoric used now to justify the recent immigration raids against Latino and other immigrant communities.
“We have to know our history, what happened in the past. We can’t keep making the same mistakes, which is what we’re doing now,” Ninomiya told Richmondside. “(Trump) said we’ve put people in prison camps before, and there’s a precedent for that. But I say the government has already apologized to us and acknowledged it’s wrong — I know that that part of history will never go away.”
She believes the struggles of Japanese Americans are well-documented and can’t be erased, in part, because of the preservation efforts of the National Park Service. There are 12 places across the country that share these stories, including the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Presidio of San Francisco.
At the birthday party, volunteers from Japanese American organization TSURU for Solidarity were teaching attendees how to make cranes out of origami as an act of solidarity. Jun Hamamoto said making 1,000 paper cranes is believed to make wishes come true in Japanese tradition.
Hamamoto pointed to the story of Sadako Sasaki, a young Japanese girl who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and later died from radiation-related illness at age 12. She tried to make 1,000 cranes at the hospital before she died.
“We have made 450 cranes so far, which is the number of national parks,” Hamamoto told Richmondside. “We are asking people to put a personal wish, or a wish for the world, on one side, and on the other side, we’re putting a national park sticker to protect our parks.”
“We are speaking up for immigrants and people that are on deportation orders now to stand up for them,” Hamamoto continued. “The wish is to end fascism, to stop deportation, to end incarceration, for world peace.”
Attendees also signed a massive birthday card for the National Park Service, ate cake and shared testimonies about the park at a story gathering station.
“When I roam around Richmond, it’s just like story on top of story … and where do we share that kind of information? We share it in places like this, the National Park and in our historical monuments,” Richmond City Council member Doria Robinson told the crowd. “There are these profound opportunities to share this hidden life of the places where we’re at.”
Robinson said if the country was a body, then history would be the bones — and it’s critical to keep the bones strong and alive. She shared that the Rosie the Riveter park helps reinforce the county’s “bones” by teaching local Richmond youths, for example, that their families, communities of color and Richmond in general was a critical part of American history.
“We’re in this really, really, incredibly important moment where we’re defining who is and who is not American, who is and who is not included in our story,” Robinson said. “We are being called, in my opinion, to act out of love and courage, to demand that we embrace this complex ‘we.’ ”
Glad to see such a great turn out on a Monday. But next time, get a better sound system. We couldn’t hear most of what was said, and we really wanted to!