Standing Rock Solidarity Benefit Concert with Tom Neilson
7 pm, Friday, October 7
Linen Building, 1402 West Grove Street, Boise, Idaho
$10 suggested admission donation
Several Idaho groups are co-hosting the Standing Rock Solidarity Benefit Concert offered by singer-songwriter and long-time activist Tom Neilson in Boise, October 7 [1-3]. Dubbed the Jon Stewart of folk music, Tom offers inspiration through his music to effect change [4]. He has performed his award-winning songs of humor and compassion in 21 countries on five continents. His songs about historical and current events reflect his travels, intertwined with his farm roots and fervent commitment to social justice. Audiences celebrate Tom’s lyrics for their political astuteness, sophistication, and wit.
The Idaho Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence, Shoshone Paiute tribal members of Duck Valley, and Wild Idaho Rising Tide gratefully welcome everyone to participate in this community event providing a gathering place for people supporting the indigenous and allied Sacred Stone, Red Warrior, and Oceti Sakowin camps actively protecting waters and lands from the threats of Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) construction and operation near the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri rivers in North Dakota and throughout its route to Illinois.
The frontline resistance of these and other grassroots communities peacefully confronting coal, oil, tar sands, and natural gas extraction and transportation projects continues to inspire Idahoans to work together across the region to defend human rights and tribal sovereignty, to seek racial and gender justice, and to halt new fossil fuel infrastructure that would pollute both the environment and the climate.
For this Friday, October 7 benefit event, the doors open at 6:30 pm at the Linen Building, 1402 West Grove Street in Boise, Idaho. Activist musician Tom Neilson begins his performance at 7 pm, for $10 suggested donations. For further information, see the enclosed descriptions of Tom Neilson’s background and Dakota Access Pipeline concerns, and peruse the websites and facebook pages of Tom and the NoDAPL resistance camps [5-8].
Please print and post the linked, color, letter-sized, PDF version of the Tom Neilson Boise Concert Flyer (tom-neilson-boise-concert-flyer), invite your friends and family through the email messages and website and facebook links about this event, participate in this Standing Rock Solidarity Benefit Concert, and enjoy the rousing music of Tom Neilson!
Tom Neilson
Tom Neilson has performed his powerful, change-effecting, folk music with his voice and guitar in 21 countries on five continents [4]. His first professional work as a musician entailed singing at a funeral home in Lewiston, Idaho. He has since earned numerous recognitions, winning several folk festivals and the 2012 and 2016 Independent Music Awards People’s Choice for song of the year for social action. A celebrated veteran of both musical stages and street theater, Tom writes compassionate, humorous songs about historical and current events, intertwining his worldwide travel experiences with his upstate New York dairy farm roots and his fervent commitment to social and environmental justice.
A 1960s anti-Vietnam war organizer, Tom has lived and worked in Colombia, Eritrea, Kenya, Nicaragua, Portugal, Senegal, and Somalia, and has been detained or arrested as a spy in Colombia, Morocco, Sudan, and at the U.S. border to Canada. He studied education and voice as an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Cortland, earned a M.Ed. in counseling psychology from Northeastern University in Boston, and wrote an international education doctoral dissertation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, examining U.S. political/economic hegemony in the Horn of Africa and around the world. Tom has worked for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and as a Peace Corps training director, rural development consultant, interpreter, coach, and carpenter’s assistant. He has taught musical theater, songwriting, English, and physical education, and worked with people with addictions, disabilities, HIV, and other public health issues.
Combining art with activism at countless benefit concerts, this Jon Stewart of folk music has helped frontline communities organizing against fracking, toxic waste, water privatization, mountain top removal, nuclear energy, incinerators, GMOs, and globalization. Tom’s witty, sophisticated, and political astute lyrics tell the stories of struggles for human rights against greed and violence. Known locally in his current home place of Greenfield, western Massachusetts, as the Bard Insurgent, Tom also enjoys backpacking in the Rockies with his partner Lynn and barnstorming with their son Jacob and ex-Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee.
Dakota Access Pipeline
Dakota Access, a subsidiary of Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), proposes to transport by pipeline 450,000 barrels of fracked, highly volatile, crude oil per day from the Bakken fields in North Dakota to Patoka, Illinois [9]. Its Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) imposes threats to environmental and human health, safety, and rights strikingly similar to the dangers of the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline. Phillips 66, owner and operator of many Gulf Coast refineries, has joined with Houston, Texas-based pipeline company ETP to finance this project.
If completed, this pipeline would cross under Missouri River-dammed Lake Oahe and Lake Sakakawea, and twice tunnel under this longest river in the United States. With three Section 408 easements, DAPL crosses water bodies 200 times, including immediately upstream on the Missouri River of the Standing Rock Reservation that draws its water from the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the largest aquifers in the world. Routed through the major watersheds of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, DAPL threatens water quality, land integrity, and wildlife habitats and health with likely leaks and spills that would impact concerned, downstream and surrounding tribal members and American citizens. Clean-up efforts at spills in North Dakota and Michigan have lasted years, and cost taxpayers millions of dollars.
Proponents have carefully routed DAPL through private lands to evade federal regulations, including on its originally planned route north of Bismarck, North Dakota. The DAPL permitting process has continually avoided proper nation-to-nation consultation with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Yankton Sioux Tribe, and has usurped landowner rights and seized private property via eminent domain. In further violation of federal laws, Dakota Access has begun construction without completing a full environmental impact statement. DAPL will transport oil to the Gulf Coast for export, creating neither energy independence nor numerous jobs. The pipeline would result in less than ten estimated, full-time, permanent positions for North Dakotans, who would instead bear the health and environmental costs of producing profits for out-of-state corporations.
[1] Idaho Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence
[2] Shoshone Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation
[4] Tom Neilson Bio, Tom Neilson Music
[6] Red Warrior Camp
[7] Oceti Sakowin Youth and Allies
[8] Tom Neilson
[9] Dakota Access Pipeline: What You Need to Know, Camp of the Sacred Stones
Wild Idaho Rising Tide 