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Posts Tagged ‘Honor the Treaties’

Neil’s letter to the editor

Neil Young replies to the Globe’s pipeline column:

Neil Young replies

Gary Mason, in his column Complicated, Like Neil Young Himself (Jan. 17) writes that I got some facts wrong about where production from the oil sands goes.

To put this in context, we were discussing pipelines. If pipelines are completed through the U.S. and Canada, the pipeline through Western Canada would send oil directly to China. The Keystone XL pipeline through the U.S. and Canada would serve oil to China and other world markets.

Both pipelines would necessitate great expansion of Alberta’s tar sands, destroying the homeland of the First Nations guaranteed under treaties and creating CO2 emissions most of the world’s scientists agree would practically guarantee a temperature rise on Earth of 2 degrees. That increase would cause catastrophic damage to the ecosystem.

First Nation treaties are legal agreements that would prevent this world environmental catastrophe. That is why we say honour the treaties.

Mr. Mason contends most Canadians have no choice “but to drive around in clunkers fuelled by gasoline. They don’t have a rock star’s bank account.”

I was making the point that there are better ways to fuel the future. My vehicle runs on biomass, a fuel the federal government has identified as a great future fuel. I travelled to the Alberta tar sands from the West Coast and then went on to Washington using that fuel in my electric car’s generator to make the point.

Mr. Mason may be right when he says that per day, the CO2 coming from the tar sands is half the CO2 emitted from every car in Canada. I don’t think that’s anything to be proud of. I don’t think the world’s scientists do either.

Neil Young, Regina.

Read more at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/letters/jan-20-neil-young-replies-to-the-globes-pipeline-column/article16404188/#dashboard/follows/

Neil Young Concert Tour Surpasses Anti-Oilsands Fund Goal

Neil YoungSinger Neil Young says his controversial anti-oilsands tour has passed its $75,000 goal to raise money for a northern Alberta reserve’s fight against oilsands development, according to Huffpostmusic Canada.

“The tour has been a great success,” Young said at a press conference today in Calgary, just prior to the last of four fundraising concerts.

“Awareness was raised. Now Canada must respond in the courts,” he added, referring to a lawsuit launched by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation against Shell Canada’s expansion of its Jackpine mine, a project even Ottawa has admitted will likely cause significant adverse environmental effects.”

Proceeds from Young’s tour will support the first nation’s legal defence fund.

Read more at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/01/19/neil-young-concert-tour-anti-oilsands_n_4628851.html

Neil Young Set List: 2014-01-19, Jack Singer Concert Hall, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

neil-young_honour-the-treaties
Last show in a four-show Canadian series to raise money for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation to fund a lawsuit against Shell Canada.
2014-01-19
Jack Singer Concert Hall, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Honour The Treaties Benefit
Solo concert set list:
1. From Hank To Hendrix
2. Helpless
3. Only Love Can Break Your Heart
4. Love In Mind
5. Mellow My Mind
6. Are You Ready For The Country?
7. Someday
8. Changes
9. Harvest
10. Old Man
11. A Man Needs A Maid
12. Ohio
13. Southern Man
14. Mr. Soul
15. Pocahontas
16. Four Strong Winds
17. Harvest Moon
18. Heart Of Gold
19. Blowin’ In The Wind
20. Mother Earth
Tom Hambleton at http://www.sugarmtn.org/
For live pics of the concerts from roving reporter Laslo, Der Komssissar visits www.Human-Highway.org

Please donate to help the First Nation’s battle against the Alberta tar sands.. http://www.honourtheacfn.ca/

Neil & Petro Producers did not meet

B821505985Z_1_20140119135831_000_GT215KFDJ_2_Content“It is like a war zone, a disaster area from war, what’s happened up there,” Young told a news conference ahead of his Winnipeg concert.

Thespec.com is reporting that Neil Young did not accept an invitation from a petroleum producers group to meet before his final concert to raise money for opponents of Alberta’s oilsands.

The Hamilton Spectator is located in  Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers issued a statement today (Sunday Jan. 19)  saying it offered to “have a balanced discussion” Young and the chief of a first nation that is fighting oilsands development, according to Thespec.com.

But a representative of Young and Athabasca Fort Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam offered an alternative that was unacceptable, CAPP said.

“Young’s representative suggested oilsands producers participate in Neil Young’s media conference today, but when CAPP requested a neutral moderator and equal representation, the organizer said this was not acceptable,” the CAPP statement said.

His tour wraps up tonight in Alberta, the province with the most at stake in the debate over the economic and environmental effects of oilsands development.

Young remained unbowed throughout the week of benefit concerts for the Athabasca Fort Chipewyan First Nation and warned on Thursday that Alberta could end up looking “like the moon” if land isn’t preserved.

Read more at:

http://www.thespec.com/whatson-story/4324064-neil-young-concludes-anti-oilsands-concert-series-with-show-in-calgary/

 

Winnipeg show: Young to Harper: Fear Our Emotion!

With his tar sands tour, the artist, and others like him, can help us find our national voice again.

By Ian Gill, Today, TheTyee.ca

There was never really any doubt that Neil Young’s return to Winnipeg some 50 years after he left — “I added it up,” he said on Thursday night — was going to trigger a mix of nostalgia and affection from a packed house at the Centennial Concert Hall in a city that claims Young as its own.

He arrived after travelling cross-country from Toronto, where he had kicked off his deliciously and deliberately provocative “Honour the Treaties” tour, having crossed a big chunk of “beautiful, beautiful Canada,” passing through its vast forests and celebrating its clean air. He was a long way from the tar sands, clearly, but through his complaints about the “degradation of land, air, water, climate and people across North America,” he has been getting very near to an essential truth about today’s Canada.

Our national voice has been drowned out for so long that we’ve almost lost the language to express what we want our country to be. The colonization that began at contact and found its zenith in residential schools hasn’t really stopped, and it turns out the indigenous peoples of this land, who have arguably suffered the most, are far from alone. This is hurting everyone.

The colonial-industrial complex is alive and well and, just like they did in residential schools, our governments have tried to beat us or ban us from speaking, in whatever actual tongue, of a Canada that is compassionate, considerate and has a confidence rooted in a shared hope for a better world, not just on a budget balanced on the impoverishment of our environment and our cultures for the benefit of a few.

At the concert hall Thursday, David Suzuki, our environment’s rhetorician-in-chief, told me Young had elevated the dialogue and understanding of the tar sands far beyond anything he, and the environmental movement, have managed to achieve through their advocacy.

Suzuki seemed more delighted than surprised, and we should be, too.

What governments fear

Environmentalism isn’t dead, but it exists as much as to preserve ego-systems as ecosystems, to protect pieties as much as places, and in any event is simply no match for the extremism of Stephen Harper’s brand of politics. In part, that’s because environmentalists play mostly within the rules, and overwhelmingly, governments set the rules. Of course, in Harper’s case they ignore the rules that don’t serve their interests, and escape punishment except, in theory, at the polls.

Plainly put, our governments don’t fear environmentalists, even icons like David Suzuki. But governments fear emotion, which they can’t regulate, and who but our artists are capable of stirring our emotions, giving them expression, and releasing the trapped energy in our national psyche?

If the answers to our largest and most intractable social and environmental issues are cultural, not mechanical — and I passionately believe this to be the case — then it seems not just fair but vital that our artists pose the questions of our time in the ways they know best, and use their talents to liberate us from the tyranny of our abusers.

This is not a call to a collective singing of “Kumbayah,” although a sing-a-long with Neil Young playing “Ohio,” quickly followed by “Southern Man,” seemed entirely appropriate under the circumstances on Thursday. Rather, it is to recognize the long history of art as activism that has illuminated some of our world’s darkest eras, and to take comfort from the fact that Harper’s office is so tone deaf that it sought earlier in the week to write Young off as simply a “rock star” who should stick to singing songs and minding his own carbon footprint.

For those of us who believe there is a phase change afoot in Canada right now, a transition from Ottawa’s impoverished ethos of economic determinism to something less rooted in certainty, to a future more informed by openness to possibility; it is in fact a good thing that the PMO wants to shrug off Young and concert opener Diana Krall as mere minstrels. The more the prime minister and his ilk discount our singers, our writers, our poets, our painters, dancers, sculptors, filmmakers, photographers, composers and comedians as mere entertainers, the greater our capacity for surprise.

An act of witnessing

It’s true that watching and listening to Young on Thursday doesn’t exactly equate with lying down in front of a bulldozer, or a tank, or monkey wrenching the machinery in the first place. However, it was absolutely an act of witnessing, and of remembering.

What was fascinating about Young’s performance was the degree to which the nostalgia that the audience felt for Young was returned in greater measure by Young himself. He spoke a great deal more than he usually does, sitting in an orange on-stage glow surrounded by his old guitars as if at a campfire, or muttering half to himself as he creaked back and forth between his guitars and pianos and an elevated pump organ. He reminisced about the seventies when, alone or in the company of Crosby, Stills and Nash, or with other troubadours of the protest era, there was a sort of symbiosis between artist and audience.

“Things kept happening to us, but we reacted together. There was no difference between the crowd and the people on the stage. We were all just people, living, feeling the fragility of our times.”
As wistful as that might sound, there was nothing the slightest bit sentimental about Young’s articulation of the issues that have driven him to mount his tour in support of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation’s legal defence fund.
Young has been to the tar sands — attracting a great deal of controversy for equating the environmental damage there with the bombing of Hiroshima in Japan — but what worried him even more on seeing the place was the realization of the abuse being wrought on local First Nations.
“I went up there to find out about CO2. What I found was a bunch of people who were being persecuted and lied to and misled,” he told the CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi ahead of his opening concert in Toronto. Asked about comments he’d previously made that “musicians should stay out of politics,” Young said his role is to “raise enough attention so you people would come hear what’s going on…. My job is to bring light to the situation through my celebrity.”

On stage, Young made little reference to the purpose of his tour other than to let people know that the proceeds would go to the legal fight against the tar sands. There was a wonderful moment, however, when he slipped in a reference to Harper in the song “Pocahontas“:

Maybe Stephen Harper / Will be there by the fire /
Talking about Ottawa / And the people there for hire/
Stephen Harper, broken treaties and me/
Stephen Harper, Pocahontas and me.

But for the most part, he let his celebrity do the talking, just like the artists who rallied in the ’80s to help save the Stein Valley, the Carmanah Valley and Gwaii Haanas in British Columbia, or the writers and photographers who elevated the Great Bear Rainforest and the Sacred Headwaters in the imagination of a public who for the most part will never go there, but somehow understand that in the fate of those places lies the fate of us all.

Demand inspiration

As important as those accomplishments were, given the pace of industrialization today and the sheer scope of development projects and especially energy projects (with the tar sands as evidence) — to so radically and irrevocably alter our landscapes and our climate, our activism can no longer be just about special places.
Or if it is, then it’s about one special place. Canada.

We have a country that has been built on two centuries of broken treaties — not just with First Nations, but latterly with other nations and here at home with all Canadian people.
We cannot stand idly by, and we have a moral obligation to look beyond our politicians for answers, because they don’t have them. We need to find answers in the knowledge and courage and hope and, yes, emotions of Canadians, and we should demand of our artists that they do everything within their remarkable powers to provide us with the inspiration that our polity is so utterly incapable of delivering.

Building successful societies is an art, yet for too long we’ve left the task to engineers.

While Neil Young isn’t the voice of Canadians, at least not all of them, he absolutely can help us find our national voice again. Maybe, in order for us to reclaim the country we are in danger of losing, for us to see our future not as the sum of our failures but of our possibilities, we need a new protest song.

And maybe Neil Young will write it. Certainly, I won’t. Sure, I string a few words together from time to time, but I’m no artist, and I’m not about to start writing songs. Be thankful for that small mercy.

But I will take a crack at writing a line that someone else might slip into a song someplace, a line that I offer up as one small refrain in the anthem that our fragile age demands.

And I’ll keep it simple.

“We want our country back.”

http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2014/01/18/Neil-Young-Stephen-Harper/

Please donate..
http://www.honourtheacfn.ca/

Random Quote

As long as we can sail away
There\'ll be wind in the canyon.

by -- Neil Young

Neil Young on Tour

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Sugar Mountain setlists

Tom Hambleton provides BNB with setlists, thankfully. His website is the most comprehensive searchable archives on the Internets about anything Neil Young related setlists. Goto Sugar Mountain.

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Human Highway

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