Every year SAR publishes its Annual Report, which describes accomplishments and acknowledges supporters over the previous fiscal year. Our 2019–2020 report is no different, and yet so much has changed, as President Michael F. Brown explains.
The School for Advanced Research (SAR) is pleased to present a virtual program welcoming U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. Reflecting on the upcoming program with SAR, Harjo shares, “The StoryMap project was a way to widen the doorway that my poet laureateship created when I became the first Native U.S. Poet Laureate. It was important to show that there are many Native poets writing poetry alongside each other, and that we speak from a sense of place in which there are no political boundaries imposed by non-Native cultures and political entities.”
The books in this list address Indigenous identity from different perspectives and in different ways: Native artists discuss the tensions between art and life; Native anthropologists and historians describe changing forms of identity via stereotyping, genetic science, ecology, and decolonization; and Native writers in various genres tell the stories of their people surviving and thriving, past and present.
In 1970 former SAR president Douglas Schwartz began test excavations at the fourteenth-century Pueblo site of Arroyo Hondo, located approximately five miles south of Santa Fe. Earlier this year, SAR made the decision to transfer its only archaeological collection to the Center for New Mexico Archaeology, the state repository for such collections, where it will be able to receive more specialized care.
Last week, we lost two members of our SAR family. On Sunday, February 14, Art Wolf, the first curator of collections for the Indian Arts Research Center passed away. Just a few days later, 2006 Eric and Barbara Dobkin Native artist fellow Christine McHorse also began her journey into the next world. Read more about their work and legacies.
In a conversation with SAR’s director of communications and public programs, Ruth Van Dyke describes how the Ancestral Puebloan builders in Chaco Canyon tried to create a “sense of place that emphasized Chaco as the center. Chaco was the fulcrum, and you can see this on the landscape.”
John Arroyo, SAR’s 2018–2019 Mellon fellow, grew up in a largely Mexican and Mexican American community in East LA. Even as a kid, he was thinking about urban issues and the diversity and future of communities like his. He is now a planner who incorporates a humanistic perspective into his work, which allows him to make connections between urban issues, art, and the social sciences.
“We began the class with an exercise in humility: writing down our thoughts and beliefs about Greenwood, and comparing that with broad assumptions, rumors, and questions.” Hear from SAR Anne Ray intern, Emily Santhanam, about her experience in the fall 2020 virtual in-depth course Unearthing Violence: Archaeology in the Aftermath of the Tulsa Race Massacre and learn how you can download the recorded course sessions.
In November 1981, anthropologists and tribal representatives gathered on the Pascua Pueblo Yaqui Reservation in southern Arizona for the 89th International Symposium, hosted by the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Although this obscure conference may have been relegated to a footnote in the history of anthropology and the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, Nicholas Barron, SAR’s 2020 William Y. and Nettie K. Adams summer scholar, argues that its story helps us to better understand consequential, ongoing political processes and Indigenous histories.
With the nation’s social and political turmoil as well as an ongoing pandemic, 2020 revealed how now more than ever the perspectives of social science scholars and Native American artists matter. In today’s post, we reflect on the last year and invite you to join us for online programs in the new year.