Summary of Headwaters Conferences Past
Every fall, Western State College hosts a gathering of scholars and writers, poets and journalists, public officials and community activists, social and natural scientists, and the general inquiring minds from the mountain region for a weekend of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural interaction on an issue of concern in the Headwaters Region. Papers are presented, but every effort is also made to make the discourse accessible through "Forum Theater" dramatizations, poetry and music, and generally a full gamut of the varieties of human communication.
A dig at a possible late Anasazi
site on Uncompaghre Plateau.
– Mark Stiger photo
HEADWATERS XVIII: Resort Communities in the Great 21st Century Transition (Nov. 2-4, 2007)
An exploration of challenges and opportunities facing Headwaters communities already familiar with boom and bust cycles as we move into a world of "Peak Oil" and Climate Change-influenced changes in transportation costs. The Conference began with a presentation of "Enemies Rehearsed", an adaptation by Paul Edwards of Ibsen's play "An Enemy of the People", in which themes of community identity, and tensions between environmental and economic values are explored.
Materials archived from the 18th Headwaters.
HEADWATERS XVII: Building Social Capital for a Stronger Civil Society (Nov. 10-12,2006)
A conference in collaboration with the Gunnison Area Community Foundation and other community foundations in the Headwaters Region, exploring the creation of the "social capital" - community networks of trust, reciprocity and plain neighborliness - necessary for community problem solving. Lew Feldstein, co-author with Robrt Putnam of Better Together: Restoring the American Community, was the keynote speaker.
HEADWATERS XVI: The American Dream in the High Borderlands (Nov. 4-6, 2005)
An analysis of two "great migrations" into the Headwaters Region over the past two decades - the growing migration here of Latinos to work, and the growing migration here of cosmopolitan Anglos to retire.
Materials archived from the 16th Headwaters.
HEADWATERS XV: The Second Great Ethic: The challenge of Civilizing Humans in Relation to Nature (Nov. 5-7, 2004) An exploration and discussion of how sacred and secular, religious and scientific worldviews shaped contemporary life in the mountain region. Philosophers Holmes Rolston III and Dolores LaChapelle were featured.
Materials archived from the 15th Headwaters.
HEADWATERS XIV: Environment
and Economy, Democracy and Media (Nov. 7-9, 2003)
Environmental
journalism was the focus of the conference, and its attention (or lack
of) to a decentralization in the great national "Economy vs. Environment"
debate over the past quarter century, with many local communities providing
leadership in working out land use and other environmental issues beneath
the "analysis paralysis" and special-interest pandering that
often dominates the debate at the national level.High Country News
was both celebrated and critiqued as the leader in true environmental
journalism.
Papers presented
and other materials archived from the 14th Headwaters.
HEADWATERS XIII: Conflict
to Consensus — Meeting Obstacles to Community Action (Nov. 8-10, 2002)
Participants in the conference examined
ideas for trying to take communities in conflict past the kind of "cultural
gridlock" that results from the widely differing value systems now
common to the mountain communities.
Papers presented and
other materials archived from the 13th Headwaters.
HEADWATERS XII: Senses
of Place — How we shape and are shaped by where we live (Nov. 2-4, 2001)
The conferees examined ways in which the mountain West
has been shaped by ideas imported from elsewhere — but also the way the
places of the mountain West have exerted their influences on the cultures
of the West over time.
Papers presented and
other materials archived of the 12th Headwaters.
HEADWATERS XI: The Region's Local
Economies (Nov. 3-5, 2000).
The presenters and conferees followed the transition in the headwaters
region from a commodity-based economy to an economy based around recreation, natural
aesthetics and resort-related development. Presentations and discussion also focused
on the extent to which local economies are externally controlled, and the possibility
of regaining more local control of those economies.
Papers and other archives of the 11th Headwaters.
HEADWATERS X: The Code of the
West – Revisited (Nov. 5-7, 1999).
The conference explored the cultural impacts of too-rapid growth,
with newcomers coming into a region faster than it is possible for the local communities
to “break them in” – to at least make the newcomers aware of local cultural mores
and values before they unconsciously change them. The “Code of the West” – the set
of written and unwritten guidelines for life in the West – was examined, to see if
was still relevant to western life. Peter Decker, author of Old Fences, New Neighbors,
was the keynote speaker.
More information on
the Tenth Headwaters Conference.
HEADWATERS IX: Relationships between Learning and Locality
(Nov. 13-14, 1998).
The conference returned to the fall months. This ninth conference
was a collaborative workshop involving the college’s Center for Teaching Excellence
as well as the Headwaters Project, on implementing the portions of the college’s
mission concerned with place-based experiential learning and other interactive work
with the communities of the headwaters region. A featured event was a presentation
by the greatest advocate of experiential learning, John Dewey, as portrayed by Tom
Hart, a professor of drama at Colorado Mountain College.
HEADWATERS VIII: After Oñate and 400 Years of Unsettlement
– What is Working? (April 3-5, 1998).
At the quatrocentenary
of Don Juan de Oñate’s entrada in the upper Rio Grande valley, and the sesquicentenary
of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferring Oñate’s old territory to the
United States, the conference explored the different ideas and ideologies that have
been imported into the headwaters region, with an attempt to determine what among
all those ideas and ideologies is, or has been made, “fitting” in the evolutionary
sense to the mix of spiritual beauty and physical rigor in the natural environment
and the challenges and opportunities in the cultural environment? Western faculty
members, students and participants from the larger region portrayed ideological avatars
in the region, from Oñate to Edward Abbey.
HEADWATERS VII: Where the Western Frontier meets La Frontera
del Norte (April 25-27, 1997).
At the sesquicentennial of the Mexican-American War and the beginning
of negotiations for the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the conference examined the
extent to which the headwaters region has been, and is still, an open zone of interaction
between the Hispanic American culture to the south and the Anglo-American culture
whose compass homes eastward. Poetry, literature, folk arts and other cultural artifacts
were the main presentations.
HEADWATERS VI: Educating the Democracy in the Community of Place
(April 26-28, 1996).
Going from Alexis de Tocqueville’s edict that “the first duty imposed
on those who now direct society is to educate the democracy,” the conference explored
the state of education in the headwaters region. This was the year that the Annenberg
Rural Challenge in education was announced, and Rural Challenge directors Paul Nachtigal
and Toni Hess participated in the conference.
HEADWATERS V: Clarifying “Community” (April 20-23, 1995 – conference
moved to the spring).
The principal question was: Is it possible for a lot of well-educated, materially
spoiled, over-worked but under-engaged, and highly diversified cosmopolitans, more
or less fleeing (but with too much baggage) from an out-of-control mainstream culture,
to create workable communities-of-place when we have nothing more in common than
an attraction or attachment to the place where we all are? The principal event of
the conference was an interactive dramatization of a public hearing, in the “Forum
Theater” mode of Auguste Boal, under the direction of Dr. Paul Edwards of Western’s
theater faculty.
HEADWATERS IV: Re-inventing, Re-investing and Re-inhabiting
the Headwaters (Sept. 23-26, 1993).
The focus the fourth year was
on the tension between visions crafted elsewhere for the place where one is, and
the subtler re-visionings that emerge after enough time in the place. Much of the
discussion revolved around the usually colonizing relationship between the nation-state
and the local place. Important discussions emerged from presentations by historian
Michael McCarthy, portraying 1890s Colorado Governor Davis H. Waite, and Dr. Philip
Klingsmith of Western State College, a candidate for Colorado Governor at that time;
also between Denver Post columnists Ed Quillen and Bill Hornby on “whether
Denver was necessary.”
HEADWATERS III: Who we are – and are not, a Quincentenary Exploration
of Colonization and its Consequences (Oct. 1-3, 1992).
Colonization,
not just as a process of the past but as an ongoing phenomenon, was the theme at
the Columbian Quincentenary. Featured was a discussion between Latino writer/scholar
Linda Chavez and sociologist Devon Peña, on whether assimilation to the mainstream
or affirmation of heritage was the better option for minority cultures in the coming
century.
HEADWATERS II: The Battle of the Paradigms in the Headwaters
(Oct. 4-6, 1991).
The first year’s more general look at the cultures of the region was
more focused in the second year on land use. A featured event was an evening presentation
on “paradigms” of land use by John Wesley Powell (as portrayed by chautauqua artist
Clay Jenkinson), an anthropocentric America settler as portrayed by Colorado historian
Michael McCarthy, the indigenous place-oriented perspective by Latino sociologist
Devon Peña, and a biocentric perspective by environmental historian Rod Nash.
HEADWATERS I: The Reopening of the Western Frontier (October
5-7, 1990).
Commemorating the centenary of the “closing of the Western frontier”
by the Superintendent of the Census in 1890, the conference attempted to establish
a deeper sense of a “frontier” as a zone of interaction between two or more abutting
cultures, with presenters from indigenous, Hispanic and Anglo cultures presenting
their culture’s perspectives on life in the region, past and present. Included were
chautauqua artist Clay Jenkinson, historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, author John
Nichols.