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Shalie Gaspar: From "Cornerstones Kid" to Career Preservationist

Shalie Gaspar

     “I was Ed Crocker’s landlord,” laughs Shalie Gasper when asked how she embarked on a career in historic preservation. Born and raised in the Pueblo of Zuni, Gasper is today the certified local governments coordinator and grants administrator for the New Mexico State Historic Preservation Division. But it all began at Cornerstones.

     Gasper met Crocker, Cornerstones’ founding technical director, when he came to Zuni Pueblo in 1993 to initiate a youth-training program, the model for Cornerstones’ future training programs. “Ed was looking for a place to rent in Zuni,” Gasper said. “My grandmother had given me a little stone house that I had fixed up, and because I had moved to Albuquerque to attend the University of New Mexico, the house was empty.”  Crocker ended up renting the house anyway, and, in 1995, Gasper, returned to Zuni to participate in the National Indian Youth Leadership Project for Native AmeriCorps. Upon returning, Gasper knew she wanted join up with the Cornerstones. “I always wanted to build with earth,” she said. “I became even more interested in the connection between Zuni architecture and agriculture and their overall influence on my people and my own sense of place.” With Cornerstones’ youth-training program in full swing, Gasper joined in the efforts to revitalize traditional building practices through the restoration of the Hapadina Store Trading Post.

      When the Native AmeriCorps term ended, Gasper continued her education, but also worked as an intern at Cornerstones in order to receive technical training in historic preservation. She became one of a group of young people who were all interns at Cornerstones. “We were the Cornerstones Kids,” she says.

     In 1999, Crocker recommended Gasper for an internship with the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) in Sydney, Australia, and upon her return, Cornerstones hired her as assistant project coordinator working alongside Pat Taylor in southern New Mexico. After leaving Cornerstones in 2001, Gasper worked with John D. Wirth, cofounder of the North American Institute, to help implement a tri-national youth volunteer program in historic preservation and environmental education. A career high point was Gasper’s coordination of the 2002 US/ICOMOS conference in Santa Fe. A woman of many accomplishments, Gasper remains most excited about working with communities in hands-on preservation efforts. Today, she plans to continue her graduate studies in historic preservation and landscape architecture at UNM

     Before joining HPD, Gasper took a year off to complete the restoration of her stone house in Zuni. “I came back to where it all started,” she says. “Cornerstones helped me to recognize that I came from someplace important.”