By ANDRIA WILLIAMS
Staff Writer
 

Their latest tour, stopping at Bates tomorrow night, is designed to raise awareness about government plans to store nuclear waste on designated Native American land. Doors will open at 7 p.m. for the performance in the Gray Cage. A small amount of tickets are still available.

The Indigo Girls have a history of commitment to this social issue. They embarked on the Honor the Earth tour in 1995, which lasted a month, had 21 stops, and generated more than $300,000 for Native American environmental organizations. It was the largest single fund-raising effort in Native American activist history.

As a result of this tour, more than 25,000 "action cards" were mailed to local, state and federal officials in protest, and a huge awareness for the problems facing these peoples was raised. In addition, the Indigo Girls have performed concerts at many Native American communities in Alaska, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Arizona.

The specific problem addressed in this year's tour is the problem of nuclear waste storage on Native American land. A recent proposition known as the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1997 would transport high level nuclear waste across 43 states. Much of it would "temporarily" be stored at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, a sacred site to the Shoshone and Pauite peoples.

More than 50 million people live within a half-mile of the site, at which one cask alone would contain the radiological equivalent of 200 Hiroshima bombs. This is in an area that has had 621 earthquakes (of varying severity) in the last 20 years alone. With their current tour, the Indigo Girls hope to raise enough awareness and generate enough outrage against the proposition to defeat it.

The duo, consisting of Georgia-born artists Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, have never been shy when it comes to expressing their opinions on any social, moral or personal issues, from human rights to their own sexuality.

Ray and Saliers have had a long history together; they met in elementary school in a suburb of Atlanta. They began their musical career in high school when they entered a talent show. From there they expanded their arena to include local bars and night clubs, despite the fact that they were both underage. They called themselves either "Saliers and Ray" or "The B-Band".

The Indigo Girls recorded their first tape in Ray's basement. They released it in 1981 as Tuesday's Children.

The pair was briefly separated during college; Ray traveled to Nashville to study religion and English at Vanderbilt while Saliers worked toward her English major at Tulane. However, they returned to Atlanta to attend Emory University and soon began performing together again.

Their national debut came in 1989 with "Indigo Girls", eventually achieving platinum sales. Nomads Indians Saints, Back on the Bus, Y'all, and Swamp Ophelia all reached gold status. Prior to Swamp Ophelia, the Indigo Girls released Rites of Passage, which also went platinum. This was followed by 1200 Curfews and their latest release, Shaming of the Sun, which the duo credits with granting them even more freedom than they'd had before.

In a recent interview, posted on a website sponsored by Ben and Jerry's, Saliers explained this freedom: "In the studio Amy and I felt completely free to do exactly what we wanted to do. For the first time, we co-produced; we learned, and wrote on a lot of different instruments; we weren't afraid to try something much more expansive. And I feel good about this record in ways I've never felt about anything we've done in the past."

Both members of the band credit each other with different strengths. Says Saliers, "Amy's stream-of-consciousness approach--and it's one I envy--allows her music to take on its own whole life. It's the basis of the unfettered passion all her songs exude." For her part, Ray compliments Saliers as having "an ability to come up with melodies with genuine mass appeal. That's amazing. She can also turn a phrase with the same result."

All music has the ability to touch scores of people in countless ways. Says Saliers, "We get a lot of letters from people who are very specific about the ways that certain songs have helped them through a difficult time or changed them or made them think about things." Now the Indigo Girls are asking us to think about an issue that they hold very dear, and are hoping to change our minds, by performing their Honor the Earth tour.