Remarks at the Colorado Mountain College Leadville Commencement Ceremony
Remarks as Delivered at Colorado Mountain College (CMC) Leadville Commencement Ceremony on Friday, May 3, 2024
I am really honored to be here today. There is nowhere I would rather be. I wish to ask the graduating class one more time if you would stand and applaud the people that once again helped you get here, because nobody got here by themselves.
One of the great privileges of representing Colorado is that every mountain pass that you have a chance to traverse, every river that you cross, every community that you visit provides another opportunity to reflect on people who came before us, the challenges that they encountered, and the debt that we owe them. No place is more connected to that history than Leadville.
I was here in September, last year, for the unveiling of the Irish miners memorial across town. That memorial commemorates the immigrants that arrived here, many about the age of the youngest people in this graduating class, during the silver rush to escape famine and poverty and religious persecution.
In Leadville, it turned out, things weren’t much better for them than they had been. They still faced religious discrimination. And now they work for meager pay at a really high elevation and 10 feet of snow and temperatures 30 degrees below zero. Many ended up just across town in a potter’s field with unmarked graves, very far from home.
Through the hardships that they faced, they forged a community that was as tough as they were, and led a fight for better pay and safer working conditions on behalf of miners all over the United States of America.
It would take a century for us to recognize their strength and illuminate their names in the memorial that is here. And whether they knew it or not at the time, and they probably didn’t, they helped move Colorado and our country closer to our highest ideals.
More than half a century after the Civil War — this is a story that you know – 15,000 soldiers arrived by train at Camp Hale, just 17 miles from here. They formed the United States Army’s 10th Mountain Division. They trained to fight the Nazis in the frozen mountains of Europe.
Some of these soldiers were the best skiers and mountaineers in the world. Others had literally never seen snow before in their lives. The conditions — which I don't have to paint a picture for you about because they’re the same ones the Irish Miners faced and the same you have faced going from class to class and in the backcountry — were so tough that Camp Hale actually to earned the name “Camp Hell.”
I wasn’t gonna say this but I will say it now: one of the veterans that I met in Camp Hale, pointed to the mountains and told me that his father had said it was the toughest son of a bitch he had ever seen…
But like you, the skills that they learned from one another: skiing, rappelling, mountaineering. And the values they came to share — perseverance, loyalty, dedication to a cause greater than themselves — literally changed the course of history, from here in Leadville.
And after three long years of training in the relentless climate and terrain that you’ve gone to school in now, the Army sent them to the mountains of northern Italy in 1945. And after 114 days of bloody combat, they punched through the German lines at an elevation no one thought was possible. And they cleared the path to Allied victory in the war.
They defeated fascism in the name of democracy, pushing our country closer to its highest idea. And that wasn’t even enough for them.
When they came home, a number of the 10th Mountain veterans founded ski and outdoor industries that you’re studying to be a part of. Carrie, I have no doubt they would have been excellent faculty members here at CMC.
The same year that those soldiers arrived at Camp Hale that I just talked about, President Roosevelt signed the proclamation and stripped 120,000 Japanese Americans of their businesses, of their farms, of their homes, and interned them in labor camps throughout the American West.
Camp Amache was one of those internment camps. And that was just 300 miles down the Arkansas River from its headwaters, right here in Leadville.
Some of the first arrivals at Amache were children who were forced to grow their own food, forced to build the camp that would intern themselves and their families and parents until the end of the war.
While their families were locked up out of racial hatred, remarkably one out of 10 of the people were locked up behind barbed wire on the eastern plain of Colorado downstream from here, one of ten, many of the youngest people in this class, volunteered to serve for the Armed Forces of the United States to fight fascism in Europe and Asia, while their own government, our democratic government, locked up their families.
31 of Amache’s volunteers lost their lives during World War II. One of the units in this same regiment was the most highly decorated of World War II.
If their constitutional rights had never been threatened, or if your right to stand here or be heard here has never been threatened, it might be difficult to understand that level of patriotism.
Marion Konishi, the 1943 valedictorian speaker at Amache High School, tried to do it in her commencement speech, when she explained what was at stake for her and while she said, “Sometimes America failed and suffered. Sometimes [America] made mistakes, but she always admitted them and tried to rectify the injustice that flowed from them… Can we, the graduating class of Amache Senior High School, still believe that America means freedom, equality, security, and justice? Do I believe this?” she said. “Do my classmates believe this? Yes, with all our hearts, because in that faith, in that hope, is my future, our future, and the world’s future.”
Marion’s conviction for America — and the conviction of those who fought facism while their families were denied basic freedoms here at home — is not some saccharine story about people never losing hope in America because, after all, “we really are better than this.”
What Marion understood was that the United States could never fulfill our true purpose as long as she was locked up on the Eastern Plains of Colorado. That our nation’s purpose was too important to humanity to be destroyed by our own shortsighted racism, when facism was destroying the world. And for the world’s sake, not for hers, that we would have to rectify the injustice she and her family suffered.
Camp Hale and Camp Amache: two camps formed at the same moment, to win the same war, in service of the same patriotic values. One camp: a place of national honor; the other: of national shame. That’s the profound struggle of which Marion spoke.
Our country’s Founders understood that struggle, and they gave us the Constitution as a mechanism to build on their progress and to move our nation closer to our highest ideals. But the more I’ve seen of our state and our world, the more I’ve come to believe that the list of Founders does not end with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
It encompasses all those who followed and answered the challenges of their time — Americans like Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Martin Luther King. They are Founders, too, of this country. But the Founders are not just the people who fill up our history books. They are also the Irish Miners, the 10th Mountain Division and Nisei fighters, 18-year-old Marion Konishi.
And the list of our Founders also includes you.
Here already in the graduating class, CMC, you have served our communities as first responders and firefighters, you’ve worked in Leadville’s schools as paraprofessionals and now as teachers. As members of the Outdoor Recreation Leadership Program, you have volunteered your time to ensure the next generation of Coloradans are on the river, skiing our slopes, and hiking our trails. You are learning already how to manage our ski resorts more sustainably and more efficiently and so much else.
We need you as much as the Founders who came before you. Who else can take up the global challenge of climate change than the students who have studied it in the turmoil of a never-ending wildfire season and a hotter, drier winter — and who know that the entire ski economy of our state and the American West depends on meeting this challenge?
Who else can demand and design a more inclusive economy when teachers and forest rangers and nurses are relentlessly priced out of housing in the communities they simply wish to serve — threatening the chance for another generation of Coloradans to embrace a life in the mountains? Who better to help us fix our broken immigration system than those who have lived in perpetual fear of its brokenness, yet understand the importance of immigration to our history, our mountain economy, and to our communities? When American lifespans are literally shrinking compared to other nations around the world, who else will invent new approaches to health care and mental health care than those who have experienced the scarcity of health care than college students in rural Colorado?
Who better to lead the way into a changing West than you?
As graduates of CMC, you share more than geography with the young miners, soldiers, and prisoners who once occupied this state. You and they are part of a continuum, not just of Colorado, but of democracy itself.
You are part of the battle between the highest ideals that humanity has ever committed to the page, the words in our Constitution, and our worst impulses of humanity— from slavery to Amache.
Learning at this altitude has given you the resilience, both physical and mental, to take up the challenges of your time. And the distant views from this place have given you the perspective to see what needs fixing in our democracy. Who better to stand up for our highest ideals than you?
You are as prepared to meet this moment — I would say more so — than the Irish miners who came here a century ago, the soldiers who trained at Camp Hale, and the citizens who fought fascism on the Eastern Plains from behind barbed wire.
Their examples tell us something important about fighting a battle between humanity’s highest ideals and our worst impulses. In our time, it’s up to you to make the right choice between the two — to fulfill your responsibility as a Founder.
Everything now is in your hands. We need you now, and we have nothing but confidence in you.
