Indigo Girls Concert Preview—

Amy Ray Is A Passionate Advocate For Grassroots Activism

By John Voket

With a preference for punk music and activism in her blood, Amy Ray and her Indigo Girls partner Emily Saliers have remained two of the music industry’s most dedicated advocates for gun control, gay rights, the environment, Native Americans and indigenous peoples’ causes worldwide.

Indigo Girls will be celebrating a return to the reservation of sorts next week when they play two intimate acoustic shows July 24 and 25 at Mohegan Sun’s Cabaret, part of a cross country tour that will wrap up with Amy and Emily headlining the final day of the Newport Folk Fest on August 6.

Taking a few minutes to chat with The Newtown Bee last week, Amy Ray spoke passionately about the duo’s lifeblood of activism, and a bit about the new Indigo Girls studio album scheduled for release September 19.

John Voket: It’s a long way from strumming your six string in a mud house on a reservation to the Cabaret at Mohegan Sun, but when you see the economic benefits finally coming to native nations that have been fortunate enough to tap into the wealth casino gaming has brought to them after centuries of being murdered, run off and exploited, it has to feel like victory in some small way, doesn’t it?

Amy Ray: I feel the indigenous communities that have casinos took a situation where it was really hard to find any economic opportunities in any part of the land that they were given – and a lot of times they weren’t even given that much land in the first place – and did something that was pretty ingenious.

Even if you don’t agree with gambling and all of that... These communities can do something with what little they were given that creates an economic base, that brings good health care to their people and supports good education. And Mohegan Sun is such a special place because it’s so environmentally healthy, it was designed with such a vision.

It’s inspiring to me to see what they could do there, and it should be inspiring to other communities. Basically it’s on a piece of land where they processed materials for building nuclear submarines – this was the piece of land they were given. So they cleaned it up and built this incredible facility with so many ecological factors built into it, it’s a perfect example of turning a negative into a positive.

JV: In the mid-90s you started taking your advocacy on the road, going out to places outside the US. What was it like the first time you started bringing your message to other nations?

AR: A lot of what we learned about activism we learned from indigenous communities here while we were working with Honor the Earth, which was started in the early 90s. We traveled to Australia a couple of times to work with activists and the Aboriginal people there on an issue over a uranium mine.

Emily and I have gone to Mexico and Canada and we worked with other communities over the years looking at their grassroots and how they’ve progressed – it’s pretty amazing.

The grassroots model is very stable. It works really well in many places and is really effective as long as it is community based. In Australia and New Zealand as well, we found the non-indigenous activists to be really progressive, not in a better way, but there’s a lot more dialog and willingness to talk about it in the media. Wherever community-based grass roots activism is working, it’s working because coalitions are being built, and because people are letting the indigenous communities run the show and not co-opting the power.

JV: Where are you planning to take your activism next?

AR: In the winter we’re going to do some benefits in the Southwest around energy and environmental policy, renewables like solar and wind power. There’s a really great movement there called the Just Transition Coalition. They’re working with some communities where there was a coal operation shut down, and a huge amount of job losses.

I feel pretty humbled to see how people work in that environment building coalitions and do it in a compassionate way. I think a lot of mainstream environmentalists can learn from that – it’s a really great model, and we really need to learn from that kind of situation.

JV: How has your support of Honor The Earth helped activist Winona LaDuke forward her cause while focusing activism so strategically?

AR: We met her in the early 90s at an environmental benefit in Massachusetts. We started talking about building a bridge using our access and her access to create something bigger. So a couple of native groups got together and formed Honor The Earth, and we became amplifiers for that.

We’ve done about five tours raising awareness and money that we turned into grants. We have a board of all native activists working the grant strategies to distribute the monies to all frontline native environmental causes.

JV: I read in an interview a few years ago that you have always kept a wary eye on the military. And Indigo Girls actually issued an action alert at that time asking fans to lobby to keep the military from being exempted from environmental laws. But that issue really flew under the mainstream media radar for the most part, no pun intended. How did it turn out?

AR: That did not have a good outcome, and that’s part of the problem. We try to drum up support and to get more people aware of it – it became so obscure because there are so many issues. But this was a huge one. The military shouldn’t be exempt from these laws, and I bet if you ask people in the military they wouldn’t want to be exempt from those laws either.

It’s always hard to build consensus – it’s really hard with the political give and take in the system in Washington, in the infrastructure. That doesn’t mean you don’t have victories.

Having said that, outside the system a lot of progress is being made. I go back to the Mohegan Sun Casino as an example, a model that we can see. It is possible to build an eco-friendly facility that can be sustainable with the right amount or research and work. Seeing that keeps us in the movement, when people like the Mohegan nation win that kind of victory. Our job as activists is to be the amplifier for the voice of people like them who are really working keeping things in balance every day.

JV: Let’s talk for a moment about your next project. I guess we’ll be hearing a few songs from the new record when you guys pull into Mohegan Sun?

We’ve been playing five, maybe six new songs and the record is coming out in September. We’re trying a few songs out to see how they work live … seeing how the audience responds and such, it’s more fun that way.

Some of the new songs are a little more stripped down than others, but Emily and I are very out front in everything.

We approached the production looking at what we do in the arrangements at first, then bringing the band to the arrangements. Sometimes in the past we looked at arranging the material with the band.

We’re also planning a fall tour with a full band and we’re really excited. We haven’t toured with a full band in a few years.

For tickets to Indigo Girls at Mohegan Sun July 24 and 25, go to MoheganSun.com/entertainment. Tickets to the Dunkin Donuts- Newport Folk Festival featuring Indigo Girls on Sunday, August 6, are available through TicketWeb.com