Parks Stewardship Forum

Place matters. It connects people to nature, ancestry and culture, history, and complex emotions that are much harder to name. Place fosters a sense of identity and a sense of belonging. As interpreters, we have a habit of prescribing meaning to place, and after some time, we take that meaning as the only meaning that a place has. We share it with visitors at parks, museums, or other heritage sites, and hope that they garner as much thrill from the place we love as we do. But a place’s meaning is not set in stone, nor is it singular. Interpreters can present multiple perspectives, but there will always be other perspectives that they do not know; after all, an interpreter is just one person. The perspectives and meanings of place are complicated, and the narratives that have dominated the field of interpretation, especially in the United States, have been framed by a colonial past, which persists in our present. Centering narratives from the margins, or narratives from groups of people traditionally marginalized, requires intentionality, humility, a willingness to take ownership of mistakes, and dedication to destabilizing colonial frameworks. In this article, several tools for successfully centering narratives from the margins will be explored, as well as a case study of efforts at national parks to begin accomplishing this ongoing work.