Park Service anthropologist lost her job in mass firings. She says critical work is left undone

Ellyn DeMuynck expected to retire as an anthropologist at the National Parks Service. That is, until she was fired, along with about 1,000 of her colleagues at NPS earlier this year — one of the many casualties of the Trump administration’s DOGE cuts.

DeMuynck knows that the work of cultural anthropologists at the national parks isn’t well known. But, she thinks it’s incredibly important. Her last role there was as the coordinator for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, in the NPS Southeast region.

In her role, DeMuynck helped return cultural belongings back to their tribes nationwide. She was able to get a new job working as an anthropologist in the private sector after she was fired, but now, she fears that work and more will go undone, and the consequences of that could be hard to undo.

She wrote about it for online magazine Sapiens and joined The Show to talk more about how she was fired and if she had any prior knowledge of it.

Full conversation

ELLYN DEMUYNCK: Yes and no ... when the administration was first turning over — obviously this isn't the first time we've been under this administration, and so ... some folks felt like they kind of knew what to expect. And it was kind of a "keep your head down" approach.

We're the National Park Service, there's a lot of public support for the work we do — which there continues to be, and that's been of great benefit, I think, to what preservation continues.

But as time went on and more agencies were conducting layoffs, and especially around this notion of probationary employees, which I fell into that category; I started my most recent position in June of 2024, so I was about four months shy of that one year mark where I would have moved out of probationary.

Probationary had nothing to do with our performance, it was just within the one-year timeline. So when it actually happened, it was absolutely a gut wrench. This has been something I had been working towards. It was my career plan. I expected to do this until I retired.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow. So, I mean, obviously it hit you hard. Tell us about the impact on the office, I mean, how many other people went with you? Was it everyone gone in the same day?

DEMUYNCK: Thankfully, it wasn't everyone, but it was a high proportion at my office. I think there were about, I want to say about 12 folks at the office who were on that initial probationary layoff. I don't know the exact numbers that accepted the reinstatement that ended up happening. I was not one of those.

I had kind of already started to make plans because it was so uncertain what was going to happen. I have some connections, and I think people are still holding out as long as they can, because it's something that people are really passionate about — their work — but they also have to make decisions about what's going to be best for them and their families.

GILGER: Are you angry?

DEMUYNCK: I am. I am ... for myself, for my colleagues that also lost out on their dream jobs, for my colleagues that are still trying to hold down the fort, trying to continue the work they're passionate about, but no longer being supported in that, to whatever extent they were supported before. I know people are doing three times the jobs, trying to fill the space.

No one's obviously getting paid anymore. No one's getting paid at all right now. And I think ... there was so much growth that still needed to happen in relationships between the government, and tribes and other descendant communities that hold public lands sacred, and important and significant. There's always going to be more work to do, and it's a slow process, and we just got knocked back 30 years.

GILGER: So, obviously, you feel like your work was cut short, and at a time when it seemed like it was kind of headed in the right direction for you. Why do you think that it's important that this kind of work exists at the National Park Service to begin with? Like you wrote, it maintains an anthropological perspective.

There's a history of erasure, basically, of these cultures and these practices.

DEMUYNCK: Yeah, I mean ... all Park Service lands were Indigenous lands and continue to have connections to the first peoples that stewarded them, that called them home, that had a relationship with them. There have been subsequent communities that also maintain strong cultural connections to these places.

But in order for them to become Park Service units, people were removed forcibly or potentially voluntarily, and, without them there, there's an element of what made these places important in the first place that's been erased.

And so, at least, approaching public land stewardship with an anthropological perspective, with a sociological thinking about the humanity of these lands, provides space for elevating those stories, reigniting those connections. I don't believe that they've been wholly snuffed out in the first place, but giving them room and space to grow and reconnect.

I think there's an element of relevancy that is uplifted with an anthropological perspective; it answers people's questions of, "why do we care about these places?" It has to be more than that they're beautiful for people to really care and want to continue to protect them.

GILGER: So what do you want people to know? Like, what do you want people to know about the work that you did, but also the work that you fear will not be done now.

DEMUYNCK: I think the main thing is I want people to know that anthropologists exist within the world of public land stewardship. Cultural anthropologists — I think most people are familiar through popular culture what an archaeologist does. The subfield of cultural anthropology, I don't think people are as well versed in, but that they are there even if you don't see them when you're visiting a park.

But a lot of the information that you're learning about, a lot of the preservation of the natural landscape is impacted by the knowledge sharing. Cultural anthropologists, when they highlight the connections that other people have to these places, they also can help put a light on the fact that there are multiple ways of knowing and multiple ways of caring for places and making sure that there's a more holistic way to approach land stewardship.

GILGER: What do you say to those who might say, you know, "the administration was right in this, the federal government was too big, there are too many workers, the work that you're doing was not essential"?

DEMUYNCK: I, thankfully, haven't had to have any of those personal conversations. I don't know exactly what I would say. I think I would have a hard time not getting flustered.

GILGER: Yeah.

DEMUYNCK: I mean, when it was all happening, there were lots of statistics coming out of, like, the wage of federal employees was 4% of our budget.

The parks are extremely understaffed and have been for decades. People's experiences at the parks, their sustainability, their existence is only going to be improved when there are people that are there to do the work and have support.

There was the Section 106 consultation hearing with the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on Wednesday, and I think something I heard out of it multiple times was that it's not the process, it's the fact that there's no one there to do it.

So if there's slowdowns, how does having fewer people help that?

GILGER: It's interesting. Alright, we'll leave it there. That is Ellyn DeMuynck, an applied anthropologist, former NAGPRA coordinator for the Southeast region at the National Park Service, joining us. Ellyn, thank you for coming on and telling us about this. I appreciate it.

DEMUYNCK: Thank you, Lauren.