Salmon Pueblo was built and inhabited by ancestors of contemporary Native peoples of the Southwest. Today it is not considered a ruin, but a place that is alive with ancestral connections and where migration was part of a larger spiritual covenant.
Many Tribes and Nations claim ancestry to Salmon Pueblo. Though it is commonly referred to by the surname of colonial settler George Salmon who owned the site from the early 1890s until the mid-1950s, it is known by other names in the numerous Indigenous languages of the region.
Salmon Pueblo was an important part of the Greater Chaco Landscape from the eleventh through thirteenth centuries CE. Today, 26 Tribes and Nations serve on the National Park Service Tribal Consultation Board for Chaco Culture National Historical Park. For the purposes of this project, these Tribes were contacted and invited to provide input on SPARC. At this point, however, the SPARC website does not provide information on their interpretations or histories of Salmon Pueblo.
Our hope is that SPARC is a first step towards decentering Euro-American forms of interpretation/classification for items of cultural heritage. We would like to work with interested tribes to create an improved version of SPARC that could serve as a model for how to foreground Indigenous perspectives about these items and this place.
Twenty-six Tribes and Nations serve on the National Park Service Tribal Consultation Board for Chaco Culture National Historical Park:
Jicarilla Apache Nation
Ohkay Owingeh
Pueblo of San Felipe
Pueblo of Santa Clara
Pueblo of Tesuque
Pueblo of Zia