FEATURE
Choosing Our Stories
Beargrass blooms in an alpine meadow at Mount Rainier National Park. Photo by Cleve Pinnix.
One of the joys of being an interpreter is plunging into learning about a site and following a story that is personally enthralling. But all good interpreters know it’s not that simple. We also have a responsibility to tell stories that carry meaning, that connect visitors to the purpose and value of our sites.
For example, Glacier Bay National Park, where I worked for years, was specifically protected as a kind of natural laboratory where we can observe how the plant and animal communities change over time in response to glacial changes. I felt a strong sense of obligation to tell that story as part of every story I shared. I did programs on history, plants, glacial mechanics, wildlife of various kinds. But every program I delivered carried information about climate change and its impacts. It was the story that had to be told.
Some sites have stories like that: the ones that have to be told. One of my colleagues works for Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site. One cannot interpret at that site without talking about racism and civil rights. Another colleague worked at Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, where the story that must be told is about the Native Americans who preceded European settlement and their remarkable works of construction.
Other sites offer a plethora of possible stories. When I worked at Mount Rainier National Park, some of the stories commonly shared there included the perspectives of early mountaineers, vignettes about wildlife, what the science of geomorphology was saying about climate change impacts to the park, how plant diversity is shaped by elevation and location, and the history of volcanism at the mountain, just to pull out a few of the options.
Workers hose an oiled beach during the response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. Photo by Alaska State Archives.
How do we choose the stories we tell? And what factors push us one way or another? When I worked for the Chugach National Forest in the 1980s, part of my job was riding a state ferry across Prince William Sound, talking to people about glaciers and marine mammals and seabirds. But on March 24, 1989, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground and spilled millions of gallons of crude oil into the Sound. The story that must be told was how that oil spill was impacting the marine mammals and seabirds people were aboard the ferry to see.
Yet my supervisor told all of the interpreters that spring that we were not to speak of the oil spill. This set up a difficult dynamic. We couldn’t ignore the topic. Visitors asked us constantly about the spill. Yet someone was trying to control the narrative. Where did our responsibility lie? Were we to follow orders and tell people we had nothing to say? Or should we learn all we could and do our best to help people understand what was happening?
This was not the first time I would find myself walking the rocky path of truth-telling without support from my employer. I chose to interpret the oil spill. This was no easy task. I flew out as an observer to see a beach being cleaned, but I had to surrender all my notes and photos to Exxon. There was no internet in those days, so I scoured newspapers and listened to the radio; interviewed biologists, residents of villages impacted by the spill, and workers serving ashore and on ships; and logged wildlife observations. I learned the hard way how to have conversations with people whose emotions were highly charged, like the Exxon employee who was incensed when, during a public program, I shared data from a news station that he believed were lies.
The following year, my supervisor (the one who had told us we couldn’t talk about the oil spill) was invited to present at a national conference on interpreting disasters. She asked me for my notes. She knew I had been delivering a program on the oil spill despite her barring us from doing so, and she hadn’t stopped me; but now she wanted to use my work that she had not supported. And she did. After all, the program I put together was paid for by the federal government, and it didn’t belong to me.
Climate change is another touchy topic. For years, I interpreted climate science at national parks while the National Park Service (NPS) itself walked a careful tightrope, avoiding coming out on one side or the other of the subject. It wasn’t until 2007 that a Climate Change Task Force was created in the Department of the Interior, opening the way for NPS and other agencies to support and reveal the science that interpreters had been using all along. It was such a relief to walk the trails at Kenai Fjords National Park, talking with visitors about the obvious, dramatic changes we were observing in the landscape and how climate change was driving them, knowing that my supervisors could finally back me up.
Climate change was a particular target for politics because it forced people to grapple with who was responsible and with the costs and consequences of our society’s choices. The science gets lost in the fight over values. Values are powerful stuff indeed, as all interpreters know. We aim to connect people to their values at our sites, because that’s where meaning lies. But when people’s perspectives are tightly tied to values, we can stumble into landmines of emotion.
A ranger leads students on a tour of the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site. Photo by Heather Adams/NPS.
Ranger Julia Pinnix leads a team of interpreters on a trail at Mount Rainier National Park in 2008. Photo by Cleve Pinnix.
One interpreter I admire told of a visitor challenging him at a site where slavery was interpreted. The visitor said the Civil War was not fought over slavery but over state rights. The interpreter said it surely was fought over slavery, and was able to cite a slew of research that backed him up. This was years ago, when research did not mean, “I spent ten minutes reading pages that agree with me on the internet.” Now we seem to live in a culture where personal statements of opinion without foundation are considered sufficient to change what we can say as interpreters.
But we have a responsibility to tell the truth, even when and especially if it is uncomfortable. And what is truth? It seems to me that truth lies in the fullest telling of all the facts. Many facts are missing from our national narrative. When we exclude people from belonging, when we suppress the stories of some people and elevate others, it skews the story we tell. The story of Manifest Destiny, the apparently inevitable march of European civilization across the continent of North America, that I was taught as a child, now looks to me like a weaving missing most of its threads.
I attended an exceptional interpretive program at Fort Bowie National Historic Site, delivered as an in-person living history from the perspective of the wife of an officer serving at the fort in the 1860s. It was a brilliant way to tell the story of the fort and to help us envision what it might have been like to live in the American West in those days. It wasn’t just dates and battles and soldiering, which can often dominate the interpretation of military historic sites. It invited the stories of women and children into the bigger picture.
Exit Glacier at Kenai Fjords National Park is a site that dramatically teaches visitors about climate change. Photo public domain.
Woody Guthrie does a fine job of explaining what it means to seek a national narrative. Here is an excerpt of a spoken poem by Woody, first published on May 21, 1946, in Guthrie’s “Woody Sez” column in the People's World newspaper, which musician John McCutcheon later shared on an album called This Land: Woody Guthrie’s America:
When you have crossed her as many times as I have you will see as many ugly things about her as pretty things
I looked into a million of her faces and eyes and I told myself there was a look on that face that was good
If I could see it there, in back of all of the shades and shadows of fear and doubt and ignorance and tangles of debts and worries
And I guess it is these things that make our country look all lopsided to some of us, lopped over onto the good and easy side or over onto the bad and the hard side
Because I seen the pretty and I seen the ugly and it was because I knew the pretty part that I wanted to change the ugly part
Because I hated the dirty part that I knew how to feel the love for the cleaner part
You see, this is our country here as far as you can see, no matter which way you walk or no matter what spot of it you stand on
This is our country here.
In selecting and telling interpretive stories, we face barriers and challenges. But what we say at our widespread and individual sites is part of the national narrative, the conversation we have with our country and with each other. Let it be true, even when it’s hard to hear. Let it be honest by including a wide range of voices and points of view. This is how we serve our country, by reflecting its face in the mirrors we hold up.
