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The annual Headwaters Conference, held last weekend in Gunnison, is the most infuriating event I ever attend. I usually leave the auditorium eager to launch a tirade at the nearest saloon. This, of course, is precisely what makes Headwaters worth attending.
Much was said this year of the need for preservation of traditional lifestyles and cultures. Preservation sounds noble, but it is impossible.
This dawned on me when I ran across some of the movers
and shakers who preserved
Crested Butte about a
decade ago. Climax Molybdenum had found a big deposit on
nearby Mt. Emmons. Many in Crested Butte (which was a
mining camp for 75 years) believed that a big mine would
ruin a community which had evolved into a pleasant place to
live and work. Thus the battle to save the Red
Lady.
The significant thing is one comment I heard -- of all the leaders in that fight, not one still lives in Crested Butte. They fought to preserve it as a place they'd want to live. They won the battle, but they lost the war, or they'd still be living there.
Gambling was sold as a way to preserve
Blackhawk,
Central City and Cripple Creek.
Some property owners sold out for big returns, and there are jobs. Some old buildings will stand for more winters. That's fine, but the Cripple Creek of 1989 has no more been preserved than the Cripple Creek of 1899 with 475 working mines. It has a different culture than it did when dogs slumbered on Bennett Avenue from the end of hunting season until the start of summer tourist season.
When you talk about preserving a culture, what exactly are you preserving? Gambling might revive the get-rich-quick excitement of a gold rush, but it doesn't preserve the charming ambiance of sleepy mountain towns. If indigenous Sioux culture is to be preserved, is it the culture of the rice-gatherers who lived by the Great Lakes, or that of the mounted warriors of the Great Plains -- made possible by the white man's horse?
Sioux culture is in some respect preserved
at
Pipestone National Monument in Minnesota. You go into a
room where genuine Sioux sit in cubicles that look like
cells, making traditional-style pipes to sell to
tourists.
They glare at you the way their ancestors must have regarded Custer. They should. They're being treated like animals in a zoo, and you feel disgusted with yourself for even being there. That's one destination -- live tourist spectacles -- that preservation takes us to. There are other paths, like Cripple Creek's or Crested Butte's. They save old buildings, or the scale of the town, but they don't preserve the community that wanted to be preserved.
Cultural preservation is like perpetual motion. It would be nice if it worked, but it doesn't, and we might more profitably turn our thoughts elsewhere.
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