There's been something unseemly in the haste with which Santa Fe Indian School's administration has torn down the old part of its campus along Cerrillos Road.

Historic buildings, some with murals for the ages and many with carved-wood posts, beams and other hallmarks of Pueblo and Pueblo-revival architecture, were laid waste earlier this year in total disregard of community concerns — which school officials have disdained as impositions on sovereignty claimed by the campus as Indian trust land.

Similar scorn has been given the federal Historic Preservation act — and there've been only little and late efforts to set aside what might be saved, such as timbers and brick. Perhaps they could be incorporated in the new campus being developed on land farther from Santa Fe's main commercial boulevard.

The new campus is long overdue for the school, which serves many youngsters from our region. As for what will replace the old buildings on a prime stretch of Cerrillos, it might well benefit the pueblos.

But what had been seen — and possibly intended — as a bird in the direction of its Euro-American neighbors, as well as a rejection of Indian education of old and the cultural repression that went with it, turns out to be bothering some Indian School alumni and, privately, some Pueblo leaders as well.

If that's the case they should step in before any more destruction is done, to urge preservation, and perhaps restoration in some cases:

Were some murals painted over? This would be a great case for anthropological sleuthing, the kind of project that turns up ancient murals or Renaissance frescoes from beneath coats of paint of plaster, and becomes a feature in National Geographic. Are other parts of the school still salvageable? Some leading experts think so — but it'll take time to figure out, and that's what the situation hasn't yet been given.

Ironically, some of the art destined for destruction, perhaps by the Santa Fe Fire Department as a training ground, were political statements against assimilation by modern America, according to some scholars.

Since the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs has abdicated responsibility for what's going on, this becomes a case for the All Indian Pueblo Council, to whom BIA has relinquished considerable authority. It also becomes a case for Pueblo elders and members of individual Pueblo councils — some of them Indian School alumni. Some surely care enough about the symbolism of some murals, if not their aesthetic value, to call a belated time out while a rational recovery or restoration effort is made.