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Social obligations at home allowed me to attend only one day of the first Headwaters conference at Western State College in Gunnison last weekend, but even with that limitation, the conference was well worth the trip. In these parts, the intelligent clash of ideas and philosophies is heard about as often as a steam calliope.
Not often do you see John Nichols (author of The
Milagro Beanfield War, The Magic Journey and
many other good novels) upstaged, but it happened when he
appeared on a panel with Thomas Jefferson.
I got the
impression that Jefferson was the first revolutionary whom
Nichols had ever encountered who was not a Marxist.
We often forget that our sainted Founding Fathers,
including our third president, were violent revolutionaries
who pledged our lives, our Fortunes and our sacred
Honor,
back when honor
meant more than the
image thing.
If the reaction of the audience was any indication of
the mood of the electorate, then this is not a good year
for incumbents. Before you resort to violence,
Jefferson cautioned, do remember that you have the
ability to go to the polls and remove all 435 incumbent
members of Congress, and I urge you to do so.
That got
the loudest applause of the afternoon.
The conference theme was frontiers. The traditional
frontier, declared extinct by the census of 1890, was the
zone where civilization
met savagery.
George
Sibley, Headwaters director, amplified that to where two
cultures meet.
Cultures collide all over the Southwest: Hispanic, Anglo and South European where I live; Navajo and Hopi in Arizona; Hispanic, Anglo and Pueblo in New Mexico, etc. I certainly feel richer for that meeting -- I'm about as gringo as people get, yet I feel better about facing winter if the freezer is full of roasted chilis, the pantry holds a bag of pinto beans, and the woodpile is stacked with pinon.
But there is a contradiction which the conference failed to address. We heard panelists tell us that indigenous cultures should be encouraged to thrive. We also heard that we need to be more tolerant and respectful, that we must be global citizens.
Indigenous cultures, alas, are generally rather xenophobic and intolerant, steeped in tradition and often quite chauvinistic with firmly assigned roles for everybody. Hindu India with its castes, backwoods fundamentalists with their tar-barrel insistence that their children not be taught science or literature, nomadic societies where women are property, New Guinea tribes where visitors are dinner -- these are all indigenous cultures.
You can preserve indigenous cultures. Or you can strive toward a society in which children have a fair chance at all the world has to offer. The panelists seemed to assume that both were possible, without ever explaining how.
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