SAR Press has started a new blog series comprised of interviews with diverse scholars who have recently published or are in the midst of publishing their first book and who can offer guidance and encouragement to colleagues who are just starting to think about publishing. We hope that these interviews make a small contribution to supporting junior scholars as they begin the publishing process.
Archaeologists have been paying attention to place for many years. As they have studied vernacular architecture, among other important markers of the past, they have recognized the importance and meaning given to specific places by peoples around the world. Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico has been one such place for hundreds of years.
Free virtual event explores resilience and perseverance across pueblo communities over the last year.
The School for Advanced Research (SAR), in partnership with Thornburg, presents Showing Our Strength: Resilience and Compassion in the Indigenous Southwest (hosted online, July 8, 2021, 2:00 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time).
As we think about our relationships with environment, landscape, and place in the context of drought and urbanization, we must also think about change. The books in this list describe how environmental change affects people with deep roots in New Mexico, Guatemala, Mongolia, and elsewhere around the world.
Anthropologist, novelist, and SAR’s Katrin H. Lamon resident scholar of 2015–16, David Treuer (Ojibwe), is garnering national attention for his cover story in the May 2021 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, “Return the National Park to the Tribes.” SAR president, Michael F. Brown, reflects on the article and more.
In each session of his course on Navajo weaving, artist Venancio Aragon takes his students on a journey that exposes the impact of non-Indigenous institutions on Diné peoples and their making, as well as the sovereignty that Indigenous peoples, including artists, have continued to exercise through each moment.
The School for Advanced Research (SAR) is pleased to announce our new initiative, SAR Learns! Out of a desire to support intergenerational learning and creativity during the pandemic, SAR Learns! will assist with knowledge transmission specifically within the context of the ongoing pandemic. The program will distribute $50,000, utilizing re-directed grant funds, that will enable sixteen artists to launch or complete a variety of proposed projects.
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.
2021. Edited by John P. Hawkins
Drawing on over fifty years of research and data, the book argues that two factors—cultural collapse and systematic social and economic exclusion—explain the recent religious transformation of Maya Guatemala and the style and emotional intensity through which that transformation is expressed.