SAR President James F. Brooks

President James F. Brooks served on the History faculties at the University of Maryland and the University of California, Santa Barbara, before accepting appointment as member of the research faculty and director of SAR Press at the (then) School of American Research in 2002. He was promoted to President and CEO of SAR in 2005. His research investigates gendered violence and identity formation in multi-ethnic borderlands, comparative slavery, and interdisciplinary approaches to epistemological and narrative expression. Recently his work has shifted from attempts to understand inter-community conflict to explorations of intra-communal trauma and healing, with continuing attention to gender and experimental piety in the Southwest. His 2002 monograph Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (UNC Press) became the first book to garner the “Triple Crown” of historical prizes (Bancroft, Parkman, and Turner) in 2003 in addition to five other awards. He also edited Confounding the Color Line: the Indian-Black Experience in North America (Univ. of Nebraska Press 2002); Women & Gender in the North American West (UNM Press 2004); and a volume in press, Small Worlds: Method, Meaning and Narrative in Microhistory (SAR Press). He is at work on a new book entitled Mesa of Sorrows: Archaeology, Prophecy, and the Ghosts of Awat’ovi Pueblo to be published by W.W. Norton & Co.

President’s Message 2007-2008
A Century Past, a Century Ahead

As evening thunderheads scrolled over the bell tower last August, New Mexico state historian and former Katrin L. Lamon resident scholar Estévan Rael-Gálvez accepted my invitation to provide opening remarks before SAR’s commemorative one-hundredth birthday dinner. In words at once poignant and thought provoking, he reminded us that an institution revered for its place in the rise of American archaeology might itself someday lie buried by time and history. Yet even in ruins it may offer illumination and inspiration to a thinker in the distant future. Using as a metaphor the fifteenth-century glaze-ware bowl with which archaeologist Linda Cordell had illuminated a field trip to Pecos National Historic Park the day before, Rael-Gálvez pointed out that SAR had long served as a vessel for the blending of divergent ideas and their manifestation as new forms of thought and artistry. Not all the compositions thus stirred at 660 Garcia Street have yielded perfect results, but we take pride in the fact that so many have found acceptance and occasionally even acclaim.

The School’s successes and failures in its endeavors over the last century receive full treatment in A Peculiar Alchemy: A Centennial History of SAR, written by Nancy Owen Lewis and Kay Leigh Hagan. From its uncertain beginnings as the School of American Archaeology through its flowering as the School of American Research under the leadership of Douglas W. Schwartz, SAR gained a place of distinction in the constellation of research centers. Now, as the School for Advanced Research on the Human Experience, we pledge to carry on helping scholars and artists make unexpected connections that lead to unforeseeable advances in our comprehension of the human past, present, and future.

The year ahead will see us expand our capacity to support this mission. Two new residences and a suite of six offices and studios will be under construction by spring. We plan to undertake a major renovation of the Indian Arts Research Center vaults and lobby as well. Our five-year goal is to double the number of artists and scholars that we support, including a writer-in-residence position and an Alumni Residency that will allow former scholars and artists to return to Santa Fe for a semester.

Yet our campus cannot begin to embrace the audiences we wish to reach, nor would we want to disturb the ambient mix of creativity and research that it has so long nurtured. So new forms of outreach now dominate our thinking. This year saw the launch of our free public-education website, Southwest Crossroads: Cultures and Histories of the American Southwest (www.southwestcrossoads.org). This dynamic, interactive learning matrix of original texts, poems, fiction, maps, paintings, photographs, oral histories, and films allows thousands of teachers and students in grades 7–12 to explore the many stories—sometimes mutually conflicting—that diverse peoples have used to make sense of themselves and the region. A brief visit to the website will, I hope, confirm that it reflects the best of SAR’s tradition of independent thinking.

Closer to home, we continue to reach out through the political process to further the potential of the Galisteo Basin Archaeological Sites Protection Act of 2004. This landmark legislation, aimed at protecting, preserving, and interpreting for the public 24 ancestral Pueblo villages southeast of Santa Fe, will, if fully implemented, become a twenty-first-century model for best practices in collaborations between archaeologists, historians, land managers, and descendant Native communities. Over the past year we worked with partners in the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the State Land Office, Santa Fe County, the Archaeological Conservancy, and the northern Pueblos to secure first-time funding for site assessment inventories across the breadth of the Galisteo Basin.

We are taking to heart Rael-Gálvez’s caution not to walk into the new century with our gaze focused on the century past. SAR is rich in the wisdom of experience, and equally so in the energy of unbound imaginations. I am grateful for the honor of serving the School during this intensely meaningful moment in its evolution.