HONOR

In 1996, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls recruited Bonnie Raitt, Soul Asylum, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Matthew Sweet, Ulali, Bruce Cockburn, Victoria Williams, Rusted Root, Exene Cervenka, Luka Bloom, Jane Siberry, Latin Playboys, Indigenous, John Trudell, Keith Secola, Joy Harjo and Poetic Justice, Sherman Alexie, and Frank Hyde to donate new recordings for a benefit CD entitled HONOR. Honor the Earth is a national Native American environmental advocacy group and foundation founded by Indigo Girls and Native activist Winona LaDuke in 1993. The group has organized more than 70 benefit concerts and raised over a million dollars for hundreds of grassroots Native groups across North America.

The mission of Honor the Earth is to create awareness and support for Indigenous environmental issues and leverage needed financial and political resources for the survival of sustainable Indigenous communities. Honor the Earth develops these resources by using music, the arts, media and Indigenous wisdom to ask people to recognize our joint dependency on the Earth and be a voice for those who are not heard. While we work to raise the profile for Native environmental justice struggles, this is integrated into the larger paradigm of sustainable communities and cultural restoration. We rely on Indigenous wisdom and traditional knowledge as sources for long-term solutions to environmental policy issues. Through the course of our work, we have organized coherent campaigns utilizing the media, the considerable social and cultural leverage of artists and musicians who support our communities, and we have activated alliances with an increasingly diverse base of human rights and environmental groups. Since our appearance in 1993 as a collective initiative, Honor the Earth has directly allocated around one million dollars to over 100 grassroots Native environmental and cultural sustainability groups.