Anna Jackson

My experience and involvement with this class and working with the community of Crestone has gone beyond the average class I usually take. I say that because I was not only involved in this class academically, but I found I was involved with this class on a much more personal level. Because of this increased personal interest I realize that my interpretation of the issue has been filtered through my own subjectivity as with any anthropological work.

Working with the community I felt the same draw to the land that many of them spoke of in their interviews. It was a powerful experience to be in a sacred place such as Crestone and participate in spiritual rituals. With our limited time in the area, I still became spiritually bonded to the land and the community. With that, this ethnography struck me far deeper than I would have ever expected. With our time restrictions, this ethnography is far from complete, but would be a great starting point for further research. Crestone has much more to say.

Rachel Johnson

I had been to the Baca before with a literature class. Although I greatly appreciated the natural beauty of the area, I never felt a deep connection to the land or the town of Crestone. However, something changed during this most recent visit to Baca. Through interviews with Crestone residents and shared experiences with my classmates and local practitioners, I developed an immense appreciation for the land and am able to understand why many consider it sacred. The splendor of the mountains and wildlife bring people together from all walks of life in a harmonious way, one that I had never experienced anywhere else before. The people of Crestone are so filled with passion for the land, their spiritual practices and each other that I became inspired to join in the fight against Lexam drilling.

My research on this website is not perfect, nor complete, but it is honest. While interacting with Baca’s land and people, I became vehement that the drilling would destroy a very unique and special place. Although there are inherent contradictions involved with the issue of Lexam’s drilling in the Baca, one thing is clear: the drilling will not just destroy the environment, it will destroy the spirit and foundation of an entire community.

Penelope Morgan

I do not know why I do it. I have an utterly deep love of sight, of the sheer beauty of variety that comes with it that every day to open my eyes and be able to perceive shape, colour, form, line…is a gift. I see frames of images when I perceive the world around me. The world is infinitely full of photographs, and yet, I never take them until I leave. My camera, my voice, remains silent until I travel to someplace where I am out of my own context, and where, I feel, I am almost expected to be taking photographs. As an outsider, in a location that I can objectify without consequence, it is easy for me to take photographs in the coffee shop, to frame the landscape…it is unfamiliar. I do not know its lines and I can bind it within the confines of my frame. Buildings, trees, and especially in Crestone, those most photogenic of objects: prayer flags, become symbols that I project my own meaning onto. With my camera they have no past, only the aesthetic context that I put them in.

And I can not really be sorry that my mind and hands and camera speak so fluently with one another when I leave my home. When I generally have to work so hard to translate the ideas in my mind through my camera, moving into a setting where the environment does the work for me, where my very circumstance gives me free reign to go crazy tourist, I simply cannot but help to do so. What I do not, and cannot understand, is why I cannot see what I see in Crestone at home. Not the great layers of empty landscape, no…but the small things that exist everywhere. The hint of animation in a face, a long road, hands clasped in a lap or leaned against a face. It was people that I saw in Baca as much as I saw the land, my own classmates that I photographed more than I photographed the land. I come away from that experience with so much, but foremost knowing that it is not okay to wait until I leave to actually see.

Whitney Conti

w_conti@coloradocollege.edu

 I think one of the most important aspects of any ethnography or anthropological study is reflexivity. By reflexivity I mean that I, as an author, have a biased voice which can not claim to be objective. As objectivity is fruitless to many extents, I think that subjectivity can be incredibly rich if there is acknowledgement of voice. As a Colorado College student, I love our Baca campus in Crestone. Some of my most impactful college experiences have been in the Baca. I also think that Crestone is an incredibly unique place which Lexam’s proposed drilling would most certainly alter.

These biases have undoubtedly affected my interest in the Lexam case; however my interest in complexity has most certainly highlighted many of the opposing voices and intricacies of the issue as well. I believe that it is through diversity of opinion that we have diversity of content. Without all of the unique voices who contributed to this project, we wouldn’t have the unique perspective on the Lexam issue which we have for this website. Most importantly, I believe that my role as ethnographer is to raise questions about the assumed understandings in the issue, and use my personal voice as a way of enriching existing material and creating new understandings. So although my ultimate desire is that the Lexam drilling does not proceed and the sub-mineral rights are federally purchased and protected, my hope for this ethnography is to highlight the complexities of this issue. I understand this project as a push to create and validate a more counter-hegemonic perspective on the issue, while still trying to understand how it plays into the paradoxes and ironies of the larger society.

Caroline McKenna

Through our class Religion and Ritual, we had the opportunity to explore the area of Crestone, Colorado and to interview its many and diverse community members about their relationship to the place. I myself felt a peacefulness within me that developed throughout the week staying at the Colorado College campus at the Baca. By the end of the week, I kept saying to myself that I was not ready to leave and go back to Colorado Springs. There was something within me that found a sense of clarity and ease. Talking to spiritual practitioners, many attribute the feelings I describe to the energy of the place and its relationship to the natural elements. The sense of space around Crestone feels open and secure, as the valley is expansive and paralleled by two tremendous mountain ranges to the east and west.

Crestone is a remote town set off the main road right at the base of the Sangre de Cristo. At night the stars litter the sky with their brilliance and there is a quietness that settles as the town itself is small and the neighboring towns are quite far away. This quietness, present both at night and during the day, resonates with me, because it carries an element of introspection. It carries an ease to quite myself and to be a part of the environment. There is a feeling that permeates the area of peacefulness within this communal space, and within each individual. Many members from the various spiritual communities describe the ever-present energies of peace and tranquility that create a very special and unique place of practice.

I found Crestone to be a spiritually enlightened and incredibly unique place that generates a soulful feeling of peacefulness. The area’s energies are deeply connected to the environment of the breath taking presence of the natural elements. After my time at Crestone, I began to identify the area as a sacred space that should preserve its environment, landscape and culture to maintain the present energies of clarity and peacefulness.