Mesa Verde accused of censorship By Lindsay Nelson, Herald Staff Writer
A group of Southwest archaeologists is objecting to what it calls censorship of books at Mesa Verde National Park because the books contain the term “Anasazi.”
At its annual meeting in August, the Pecos Conference – an informal group of archaeologists from the Four Corners – passed a resolution objecting to books being left out of park bookstores because they do not refer to the historical American Indians as ancestral Puebloan, the term preferred by the tribes to which it refers. …
“Whether one word or another is used is not the issue,” [ Tessy Shirakawa, a spokeswoman with Mesa Verde National Park] said. “It’s not a matter of censorship – it’s actually respect. Out of respect to tribal members, we honor their requests about what’s appropriate and inappropriate to present to the public.”
Leigh Ku-wanwisiwma, director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office in Kykots-movi, Ariz., said his people led the protest against use of the term “Ana-sazi” because of its meaning – “enemy of old.”
“In Hopi culture, to call another person an enemy is not proper – it is against Hopi ethics to call anyone an enemy … we feel it’s a derogatory term,” he said.
It was the Hopi tribe that began working with the National Park Service in the mid-1990s to use the term “ancestral Puebloan,” a generic term that all the pueblos eventually endorsed, Kuwanwisiwma said.
But Eddie Tso, program director for the Navajo Nation’s Office of Language and Culture, said the word – pronounced nah-SAHZ-ah in Navajo – simply means “ancient ones.”
“We prefer to leave it alone” rather than change the term, he said.