Former National Park Service ranger Melissa Dalley left the agency in 2026, now handing out flyers to tourists at national parks to preserve history she believes is being removed.
Standing in a Grand Teton National Park visitor center, Dalley pointed to a blank space on a wall. A sign used to hang there, detailing the legacy of Gustavus Cheyney Doane, a 19th-century Army officer who explored the Teton region. Doane also participated in the killing of more than 170 Piegan Blackfeet.
The language was still imprinted on the stone plinth where the display had been mounted, Dalley told Outside. She documented the empty space and now hands strangers the missing text on a piece of paper.
Since April 2026, she has visited 18 parks to share these documents with visitors. Dalley, 49, previously worked as a guide at the Martin Van Buren National Historic Site in New York for four years before resigning.
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From Employee to Volunteer Organizer
The decision to leave came after President Trump signed an executive order in March 2025, directing federal agencies to review how the country’s past is presented at Park Service sites. In May, Secretarial Order 3431 required the agency to remove content that “inappropriately disparage[s] Americans past or living” and to emphasize the beauty of the setting instead.
Dalley is now a volunteer organizer with America 433+, a coalition named for the 433 sites in the NPS system. The group is petitioning Congress to stop what it calls the censorship of American history.
“I determined that I could serve the Park Service much better right now from the outside,” she said. “I wouldn’t be muzzled, and I wouldn’t face retaliation.”
Her work is not directly affiliated with the Resistance Rangers, a volunteer collective of off-duty and former employees formed in response to the February 14, 2025, firing of roughly 1,000 workers across all NPS sites. While the courts ordered the reinstatement of those workers in March, thousands left voluntarily over the following months through buyouts and early retirements.
By June 2025, park employees placed notices asking visitors to report signage they found negative about American history. Staff was required to flag their own materials. The first wave of removals began that September, targeting signs referencing climate change, slavery, and the massacre of Native Americans, among other topics.
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That’s when Dalley started tracking the removals herself. Soon, people at other parks began contacting her, and she became a hub of information. Sites that had never had reason to talk to each other were now comparing notes, from Alaska to Guam.
“People began to see the scope of it,” Dalley told Outside. “We could just start banging our drums and talking about it and trying to get the public to care.”
The effort to preserve history has often gone viral. In early 2026, Dalley drove west from New York, stopping at parks along the way. In May, she went to the President’s House in Philadelphia, the site that memorializes the enslaved people held by George Washington, where she had once given tours.
She found that visitors had filled in missing information themselves, taping up photographs of the removed signs and printed articles describing the removals. Someone had strung up a roll of butcher paper with a Sharpie hanging from it, asking passersby to share their feelings on the perceived censorship. People from around the world responded in writing.
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“Basically, the public took on the mantle of what the Park Service should be doing,” she said. “They just spontaneously, grassroots, recreated an audience-centered interpretation.”
Building a Toolkit
Dalley continued her mission with a Juneteenth teach-in at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia, then again at Grand Teton and Glacier National Parks while on vacation with her family.
She believes there is an irreparable loss associated with some of this information being censored. Signs at NPS sites help visitors connect with the place where a historical event occurred, at a moment when they’re most likely to care, regardless of whether the “given history is flattering to Americans.”
Next, Dalley plans to build a downloadable toolkit to catalogue removed signs. “Being a park ranger unlocked something in me,” she said. “I miss it so much.”
