But representatives of the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center and the Missoula Peace Quilters do.
At a ceremony Sunday, Martin will become the youngest person ever to be given the Peacemaker Award, and the handmade quilt that goes with it, in the award's 18-year history.
"It generally is given to someone who's dedicated their life to peace work," Anita Doyle, director of the Rankin Peace Center, said. "But the consensus was that Amy has already given exemplary service."
A folk singer whose self-penned songs often address war, violence and hate, Martin has been a fixture at anti-war rallies since President Bush first threatened to invade Iraq.
But her activism goes far beyond that. From her 2002 album "This Fall," where all proceeds are donated to women-run health and education projects in war-torn Afghanistan, to the plastic sacks she washes out and reuses when she goes grocery shopping, Martin's efforts go beyond the protest stage.
"I protested the war in Iraq from the beginning," Martin says. "I stood on the bridge for weeks, attended rallies, played at them. But that's a microcosm of bigger issues. I don't want to protest every war that crops up. More important is a day-to-day engagement in promoting peace."
She does that by trying to bike instead of drive. Every gallon of gas she doesn't burn, she figures, is a gallon less that we're dependent on from foreign sources - not surprising from someone whose reaction to the pending war in Iraq was to write a song called "It's About Oil," a popular part of the anti-war rallies.
"Biking instead of driving, washing out plastic bags and reusing them ... I know when I say it, it doesn't feel like much," Martin says. "But in a world view, it does boil down to doing the small things. Where you shop, what you eat - you vote with your dollars every day, on whether you want a healthy downtown, or whether you want the Wal-Marts to take over. A lot of little decisions can add up to a lot."
Raised on a farm in Iowa, Martin earned a philosophy degree from Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill., in 1995.
"I grew up on a farm when everyone else was growing up in the suburbs," she writes in her press bio. "I studied philosophy when everyone else was going pre-med or business. I make folk music when everyone's listening to pop and hip-hop."
She's followed her heart, not her head, she says, and is richer for it.
She taught English in South America and traveled in Latin America after college, worked as a freelance writer in Chicago, and "bummed around" the American West, hiking, singing on the streets, visiting communes. While visiting Oregon on that trip in 1999, she suddenly decided that music was what she should be doing.
The next week she found herself in Missoula. She'd never been here before.
She hasn't left since.
She spent her first night in town in what was then a youth hostel on Orange Street. She took out her guitar and played for the hostel's other guests that night.
"I know it sounds funny, but there was this guy there who was from Great Falls, but had spent the last 30 years in India, and he told me, 'I'm going to get you a gig!' And the next night I was over at the Raven, playing for about four people, with no sound equipment," Martin says.
She delivered demo tapes to every bar and coffee shop in town looking for work as a folk singer.
"I mean, I even took one to Buck's Club," Martin laughs. "Steve Garr over at the Top Hat told me to come to their picking circle on Tuesdays, and from that, he gave me a gig. So I was playing at the Raven, the Top Hat, then the Black Dog, the Ritz ... it didn't seem that hard."
Her days in South and Latin America probably had the most profound effect on her, Martin says.
"My first trip, to Ecuador, was my first confrontation with the fact that the image I had of the United States, as an American, was a lot different with what the people in Ecuador had," she says. "The more I learned, the more I realized I don't have half the story of what our government has done in Latin America. It was troubling to see firsthand the effect our government has had on people overseas."
From those travels, Martin has become an annual participant at rallies to protest the School of the Americas (now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) at Fort Benning, Ga. Since 1946, the U.S. has trained thousands of Latin American military personnel at the school.
Opponents say it has also graduated some of the most notorious human rights abusers in Latin America, from dictators such as Manuel Noriega, to troops who have massacred thousands of civilians, to assassins who have killed people such as Archbishop Oscar Romero.
"To listen to a woman who has had her children torn away from their home in the middle of the night by these people and watched her father shot dead in front of her ...," Martin says.
"It doesn't mean I think government is all bad. But the belief that America only works for democracy and freedom overseas is a myth. I think the most patriotic thing I can do is to come to terms with that, and work to change it."
My heart can find no logic
behind inflicting fear and pain and doubt on my own kind ...
I'm no different than the ones I criticize in these angry times
I don't know how to fight them without becoming like them.
- From "Prayer to Mamagod" by Martin
Martin - who performs with author Eric Alan on Saturday night at 8 at the Roxy Theater in Missoula - has released four albums since making Missoula home: "To You," "Unbroken," "This Fall" and "Live in Missoula."
"This Fall," the benefit album, has raised $8,000 for health and education projects in Afghanistan.
She opposed the war in Iraq from the outset, she says, because "I don't feel the reasons we were given for the invasion were right. I felt like we were lied to.
"Second, while there were good reasons to get Saddam Hussein out of there, I didn't feel that a military action would lead to the kind of stability and peace we were looking for. I wish I was wrong about that, but the evidence seems to be bearing it out. Military action is good at destroying. Military action is not good at creating, and so often you end up with a mess as bad or worse than the one you had before. What's happening has to be heartbreaking for the people of Iraq, and heartbreaking for our soldiers. We haven't prevented terrorism, we've created more of it with every bomb we've dropped. If you're going to go kill people, people will become extremely enraged with you. How is that making us any safer?"
Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at 523-5260 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com
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