Amelia Schafer
ICT
ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida – Within the coquina shell walls of the nation’s oldest fort, faintly etched drawings of sundancers and Apache fire dancers reflect the decades that Native people spent held against their will, awaiting transfer to Oklahoma and beyond.
From the 1800s until the early 1900s, thousands of Native people were held at Fort Marion, now Castillo de San Marcos, as the United States carried out mass removal of Native people from their homelands onto reservations.
“The people that were incarcerated there that were held there, they wanted their stories to be heard and they wanted to be remembered,” said Chuck Sams, who served as the National Parks Service director from 2021-2025.
In 1924, the site was designated a national monument and was renamed Castillo de San Marcos, reflecting its original name as a Spanish fort. It wasn’t until 2022 that the monument erected signs in partnership with the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma reflecting a piece of the site’s true history. Now, the Federal Government has marked those signs as under review, a parks ranger confirmed in July, allowing them to be subject to removal without any notice given to many of the tribes involved.
“Technically, I have not heard that. We’ve not been contacted regarding that,” said Michael Darrow, Tribal Historian for the Fort Sill Apache. “I have heard that such things were being done at a great many federal facilities, but had not received any official notice from Castillo de San Marcos that they were intending to remove any signs.”
Like many other national monuments and parks, various signage has been marked for review to determine whether it fits the Trump administration’s idea of patriotic values – regardless of the signage’s historical accuracy.
“I’m strongly concerned that we’re getting away from critical thought and into censorship,” said Sams, who is Cayuse and Walla Walla from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.
In March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which calls for all federal sites, including those managed by the Department of the Interior, to ensure messaging emphasizes patriotic messaging.
The messaging at these sites takes a long time to craft, Sams said. All information needs to go through an academic process before they can be put up, and if the signs involve tribes, they need to be approved by the tribes’ historic preservation officers, then sent back, reviewed and sent to the officers again.
“National Park Service works very hard to ensure that both sides of the story are told and that some people can go into it with thought and care and come out and asking more questions without being led to a conclusion so that they can do more study on their own,” Sams said.
Castillo de San Marcos, the oldest masonry fort in the United States, was built by Spanish Colonists in 1695 in St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest city in the United States.
The Seminole, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche, Caddo and Apache people were all imprisoned at the fort throughout the 1800s as the tribes were systematically removed from their homelands and shipped to different forts across the nation, awaiting where they’d be shipped to next.
Living conditions at the fort were miserable, said Michael Darrow, Tribal Historian for the Fort Sill Apache Tribe of Oklahoma. Prisoners were kept in small, crowded areas.
Apache children were taken from Fort Marion and sent to boarding schools, some going to the infamous Carlisle Boarding School in Pennsylvania. Around 30 percent of the children who were taken died, Darrow said.
“For the United States, they should remember such things because they need to know how their own government, I should say our own government, because we are a part of that, also actually functions and what has happened in the past and what might possibly happen in the future,” Darrow said. “There are perspectives that are not reflected in the standard narrative and it’s going and it will take a lot of communication and understanding and adjustment to be able to get some of that information across.”
Seminole people, including the famous Osceola, were the first Native tribe to be held at the site, said Jeff Harjo, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma.
The monument fails to mention Seminole imprisonment, just that Osceola himself was there. It also fails to mention how Apache children were taken from prison to federal boarding schools. These facts and more aren’t listed at the monument, there isn’t even a Seminole or Miccosukee flag in the room of tribal flags.
A need for more
“There’s a lot more information there and that’s what I brought to the attention of the National Parks Service,” Harjo said. “It’s like you’re not telling all of the story about the Seminoles you know at Fort Marion, and you know there’s a lot more to tell and you should have more information because you still have Seminoles in Florida and Miccosukee in Florida and for you guys to be up there at Saint Augustine there should be more information about the actual residents of Florida.”
Current signage misses the story of how the Seminole people once escaped from the fortress or the people involved in the escape. It doesn’t list the names of the leaders that were imprisoned there besides Osceola, or how the Seminole people escaped back into Florida and even into Mexico.
Harjo said he’s working to change this with the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes of Florida, but isn’t sure if the review process will limit his efforts.
“We’re preserving the history,” Harjo said. “We’re still alive. Some of us may be in Oklahoma and some may be in Florida, but we’re still alive. We haven’t gone away.”
Exhibits like these and information like this reminds us of the hard truths of American history, said Sams, who recalled one instance when as National Parks Service director, he stopped by Fort Pulaski in Georgia, somewhere he’d visited several times over 38 years.
Walking around with the park’s ranger, Sams said the ranger took his flashlight to the fort’s brick wall and gestured toward it. Hidden on the wall were child-size fingerprints that had to have been pushed into the wall when it was still soft and being formed.
“He said, ‘Those were slave children’s fingerprints and we’re just doing the interpretation of this,’” Sams said. “He said, ‘We’re finally talking about this because we found records of children who were slaves and were forced to build this fort.’ Slave labor of children. That’s an important aspect we don’t hear a whole lot about in American History. (These) tiny little children, their fingerprints are still here and they tell a story.”
The federal government’s review process of the signs is ongoing, with no set deadline in sight. What is certain is that there is a possibility that the signs will be removed in the near future. For now, they remain at the coastal Florida fortress.