Abstract
In an effort to solicit the advice and counsel of an American Indian advocate concerned with addressing the activities of anthropologists and museums, in June of 2010 Mendoza convened an interview with Museum of Indian Arts and Culture Curator of Ethnology Antonio “Tony” Chavarria at the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Antonio expresses an American Indian perspective on how anthropologists and other social scientists should proceed when evidence for prehistoric or recent Amerindian social violence, and or unsound eco-cultural practices are encountered. First, Chavarria advises scholars to share their interpretations of the data with the affected descendant populations well in advance of publishing research findings. He contends that the protocol in question presents native people with the opportunity to offer alternative interpretations and insights into the scholarly interrogation of that evidence recovered. While he acknowledges that Amerindians are fully capable of engaging in unsound environmental practices despite popular characterizations to the contrary; he acknowledges that some instances of natural resource depletion by ancestral Pueblo groups are directly attributable to the imposition of Western strictures regarding private property. He contends that both Hispanic and American systems of land tenure ultimately disrupted longstanding traditional Pueblo patterns that called for the cyclical abandonment of exhausted farmsteads, and the interim (re)settlement of other viable lands and outliers, in a manner essentially constituting a form of shifting cultivation. Ultimately, Chavarria does not condone the obfuscation or censorship of data not in accord with traditional or popular cultural beliefs, but rather, advises anthropologists to establish and maintain open lines of communication with descendant communities.
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References
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Acknowledgments
We thank Ms. Shari R. Harder of the California State University, Monterey Bay, for her diligence, professionalism, and patience in the preparation of the extended transcript of those original interviews undertaken at the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ms. Emily H. Nisbet of the Science Illustration Program at the California State University, Monterey Bay, produced those maps used, and did so under the constraints of a host of competing professional and personal deadlines. We are most grateful to her for her willingness to set aside other pressing commitments to see through those diagrams requested by Mendoza. Barbara Beckmeyer, Technology Support Consultant for the Center for Academic Technologies, and Gail Salgado, Visual and Public Arts Office Coordinator, each of the California State University, Monterey Bay, graciously worked to facilitate the digital scanning of images used in this chapter. Finally, we each thank our respective families for their unfathomable support and encouragement in our respective scholarly and professional endeavors.
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Chavarria, A., Mendoza, R.G. (2012). Ancestral Pueblos and Modern Diatribes: An Interview with Antonio Chavarria of Santa Clara Pueblo, Curator of Ethnology, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, New Mexico. In: Chacon, R., Mendoza, R. (eds) The Ethics of Anthropology and Amerindian Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1065-2_16
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