For many people, the old buildings on the green, shady campus of the Santa Fe Indian School made for a showplace . But some Native Americans saw the turn-of-the-20th-century dormitories, classrooms, gymnasium and faculty housing as symbols of cultural genocide.

"When my people saw that these buildings were coming down, it was a spiritual cleansing," one Pueblo governor recently said in a planning meeting, according to a non-Indian who was there.

"I thought, 'Man, this is pretty deep,' " said the man, who asked not to be identified. "But they won't talk about it. I think it's just a sad part of their history and they want to move forward. They don't want to dwell on it. ...

"They're almost saying, 'How dare somebody tell us that we can't take these buildings down when they represent these atrocities?' They don't say that, but you can feel it in the room."

So far, school officials have virtually stonewalled the media, government and the general public over why they began tearing down more than a dozen historic buildings late last month. Only one of the 18 buildings torn down or scheduled for demolition was built after 1930.

"I'm not going to comment right now," Greg Jojola, a Laguna Pueblo member and board president of the Santa Fe Indian School, said last week. "We're moving along with things we've decided to do."

School Superintendent Joe Abeyta was gone last week to prepare for Santa Clara Pueblo's feast day. Other school officials did not return messages. No one answered the school's main phone number last week, during the summer recess. Even the school's Web site appears to have been disabled.

State Environment Secretary Ron Curry's July 30 letter to school officials, expressing concern that the state had not been notified of where the asbestos-containing waste would be shipped, had not been answered as of the end of last week, according to Curry's office.

Sovereignty has been cited as a reason for the silence. Although tribal sovereignty might not extend to the 115 acres within the Santa Fe city limits, the property's status as federal trust land, conveyed in 2000 by Congress to the All Indian Pueblo Council, representing New Mexico's 19 pueblos, gives the council sovereignty there, say Indian law experts.

"The status of the land as federal trust land is what makes the land exempt from state or local land-use regulations," said Rebecca Tsosie, a Yaqui and professor of law at Arizona State University.

She said the U.S. Constitution gives Congress authority over federal land, including the ability to transfer it to other entities with whatever stipulations it deems appropriate. (The 2000 transfer forbids "gaming.") If anyone seeks to influence land use at the Santa Fe Indian School, she said, they would be advised to avoid confrontation and seek voluntary cooperation.

"The thing for any entity to do, without that land-use control, is to approach the tribe or the All Indian Pueblo Council and say, 'Look, you know, we really have an interest in this and we are willing to enter into a cooperative agreement with you,' " Tsosie said. "They may be willing to do something like that, to bring tourists or what have you, but it would have to be totally voluntary and cooperative."

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.