The Headwaters Project

From the mountain ridges just east and south of Western State College, water collects into streams that in turn create the great rivers that are the principal source of water for the arid and semi- arid vastness of the American Southwest and lower Midwest: the Rio Grande, the Colorado River, and the South Platte and Arkansas Rivers that water the southwestern part of the Mississippi-Missouri Basin.

The college thus sits centrally in what could be called "the Headwaters Region of the Southwest": a mountain-and-valley region of wonderful but difficult geographic and climatic diversity, and also of cultural diversity. Only relatively recently, in fact, has it become become "the Southwest" according to a cultural compass whose back azimuth lies to the east; before that it was el Norte to the Hispanic culture to the south; shortly before that it was "the South" to the Athapaskan peoples who moved down from Canada and the northern United States; and for thousands of years before that, it was simply the center, home, to a kaleidoscopic diversity of native American peoples.

Western's "Headwaters Project" is part of the college's effort to serve the mountain valleys of this region as a resource and rallying-point, as the region's communities attempt to both retain unique cultural identities and still thrive in a globalizing and homogenizing world. The Project reaches out into the region interactively through the annual Headwaters Conference, early every November.

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