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Reindeer Herders in Siberia
The New Mexico Heritage Center was established in January 1986 as an interdisciplinary research unit within the College of Arts & Sciences at New Mexico State University. Its broad charter is to unite the research methods of several academic disciplines in conserving traditional cultures whose history and culture is closely bound to the land.
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Reindeer Herders in Siberia
As more remote, less densely populated regions, such as Amazonia and Siberia, have become natural resource colonies for the urbanized centers of an industrialized world, conflicts inevitably have emerged between traditional peoples, adapted to specific ecosystems, and industrialized peoples, whose technology has made them at once more flexible in local adaptations yet more interdependent globally. Unfortunately, traditional communities and their fund of culturally informed knowledge, accumulated through centuries of experience with specific ecosystems, are often excluded from all centralized planning. Planners realize only belatedly the value of traditional knowledge in the face of environmental degradation prompted by unrestrained development. Increasingly institutions, such as multilateral banks, are recognizing that incorporating traditional knowledge by planning locally through participatory democracy is the key to creating sustainable growth which balances the impacts of development with the needs of traditional communties.
New Mexico is not isolated from these same development forces. Historically, New Mexico's economy has been driven by natural resource exploitation, that brought ranchers, farmers, miners, even sun-seekers. The population of the state has grown so rapidly that enormous pressures are created to modernize aging infrastructure or create new infrastructure. Aging carries away generation of the elderly who pass on without telling the story of how their communties shaped a special relationship to this land. Mass media and popular entertainment erode the differences in language and custom and belief that strengthen local community values and ethnic identity. These forces threaten the historical and cultural resources important to the cultural diversity which gives this state its unique character. No one suffers from these pressures more heavily than traditional cultural groups whose life is bound to the land.
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Procession to Bless
the Fields for San Ysidro Day
The Heritage Center exists to put expertise at the service of communities so that we can assist people in managing change. Cultural conservation is not inherently opposed to all development. On the contrary, it assumes that by identifying the values and beliefs that derive from specific cultural traditions and by adapting technologies and development strategies to them, we can foster sustainable development in a socially and politically favorable climate for the creation of a more benign human environment.
Cultural conservation, then, has a management orientation, is invoked to resolve conflicts, and can be both reactive and proactive.
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Interview Scene