Buffy Sainte-Marie
Buffy Sainte-Marie changed the world that she was born into.
For five decades, over 17 studio albums, Buffy—troubadour, songwriter, spiritual tourist, social provocateur, educator, mixed media digital artist, and children’s book author—has shared her views on Indigenous rights, decolonization, and the environment.
A powerful and raw singer/songwriter with unmatched scope, she has steadfastly refused to be trapped in the patterns of the past or be entangled in the workings of the contemporary music industry, especially its stipulation that artists must be mainstream to succeed.
Her marvelous catalog includes: “Until It’s Time For You To Go,” “Up Where We Belong,” “Universal Soldier,” Cod’ine,” “Soldier Blue,” “Now That The Buffalo’s Gone,” “My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying,” “Starwalker,” “Carry It On,” “He’s An Indian Cowboy in the Rodeo,” “It’s My Way,” “I’m Gonna Be A Country Girl Again,” “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” “No No Keshagesh,” “Piney Wood Hills,” “Cripple Creek,” “Darling Don’t Cry,” “You Got To Run (Spirit of the Wind),” “Little Wheel Spin and Spin” and so much more.
Her songs have been recorded by Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand, Celine Dion, Gram Parsons, Janis Joplin, Neko Case, Françoise Hardy, Cher, Indigo Girls, Bobby Darin, Neil Diamond, the Four Pennies, New Birth, Shirley Bassey, Donovan, Joe Cocker, Jennifer Warnes, Glen Campbell, Andy Williams, Peggy Lee, Willie Nelson, Red Box, the Charlatans, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Man, the Barracudas, Courtney Love, and many others.
To meet Buffy, who is now 80, is to be struck by her pugnacious wit, and an exuberance that radiates from her.
“The kind of writer that I am, I am writing all of the time,” she explains. “I love songwriting as a medium of expression. There is something about a song that is not going to happen with a 400-page book. A song can be about anything. It can be in any style. It can be very personal to the writer, and it can also be universal in trying to address all audiences or a certain audience. It is a very wonderful art, and I still love it.”
In addition to winning five Canadian JUNO Awards and being inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1995, Buffy was the first Indigenous person to take home an Academy Award as co-writer of “Up Where We Belong” in 1983 for Best Original Song. From the film An Officer and a Gentleman, the song recorded by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes also won Golden Globe and BAFTA honors. On the April 22nd, 2021, online program, Breaking the Oscars Ceiling, Buffy along with Sophia Loren, Whoopi Goldberg and Marlee Matlin discussed their individual significant Oscars milestones.
Few cultural castaways have been more vindicated by the passage of time than Buffy, who has never stopped talking about, and writing songs demonstrating how colonization, Indigenous rights, and environmental destruction are implicitly linked.
She is fully aware that the devastation caused by residential schools has finally become a national subject in Canada among other topics including genocide; therefore, she’s nowhere near done with being an activist.
“There were two things evident in my life,” she says. “One, that I couldn’t be a musician because I couldn’t read European notation. The other was that I couldn’t be Indigenous because growing up back then there weren’t any (American natives) in Massachusetts and Maine. Being Indigenous is not that uncommon in the world, but it is in the world of show business. We are such a small minority that it is quite different.”
There is no official record of Buffy’s birth. It is believed she was born in 1941 on the Piapot First Nation reserve in the Qu’Appelle Valley of Saskatchewan. She was taken from her birth family when she was two or three, and adopted by a couple in Massachusetts.
When she was young, Buffy was a piano and crayons kind of kid, for solace and for fun. She began playing piano when she was three. “I started playing fake Tchaikovsky on the piano just by ear,” she recalls.
As she grew up, Buffy was greatly touched by the pop music she heard on the radio. “When I was a little girl, I used to love magazines like Hit Parader, Song Hits and Country Roundup that printed the lyrics of songs. That was my life. I loved Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Platters, Lavern Baker and Jo Ann Campbell. I used to get on the train and go to the Alan Freed Brooklyn Paramount rock shows when I was a teenager. In those days, you were thought to be morally corrupt if you liked that kind of music. So I didn’t really have any pals in high school.”
“I was told in school that I couldn’t be a musician.”
As a teenager, she began painting, and playing guitar. “I was told in school that I couldn’t be a musician,” she says. “That was made very clear to me.”
Buffy attended the University of Massachusetts where she soon made friends with a young Taj Mahal, who led a rhythm and blues band, Taj Mahal & The Elektras.
“In college, I majored in Oriental Philosophy and Religion because I was so crazy about the idea of knowing people through what they perceived as their relationship with the Creator. When it says in the Bible that we are made in the image of the Creator, to me that sounds like it’s talking about creativity, about songwriting, pictures, dancing and thinking. So the Creator, and creating, and creativity, and the creation are to me all intimately connected.”
While at college, Buffy wrote songs in her dorm. “I got into music because I was a natural writer, and I had a lot of curiosity about sound. In the 1960s, there was an open window into the music business. When I left college, I went to Greenwich Village. I came in writing my own songs,” including penning the anti-war protest anthem “Universal Soldier” in 1962.
In Greenwich Village, Buffy was swept into a circle of musicians playing there, including Bob Dylan, Ian & Sylvia, Joni Mitchell, Phil Ochs, Dave Van Ronk, Carolyn Hester and Judy Collins. She soon landed a deal with Vanguard Records, the hottest folk label of the period.
“At the time, I was also being courted by Blue Note Records. I was writing my own music. There wasn’t a name for it, really. Vanguard and the rest, they were trying to sell something called folk music. I was a singer and I wrote a lot of songs that sounded like they were folk songs. I was lucky to be around some genuine folk singers. Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Ewan MacColl were among those singing songs that had been around for 400 years. So that was a pretty good model for a young songwriter to learn from.”
“Oh it’s all in the past you can say / But it’s still going on here today.”
In 1964, when she was 21, Buffy released her first Vanguard album, It’s My Way! which featured two later widely covered songs, “Universal Soldier” and “Cod’ine”, as well as “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” a pivotal song in her career. It is intriguing that she was named Billboard magazine’s Best New Artist of the year.
In 2020, It’s My Way! received a Polaris Heritage Prize in Canada.
“It was such a diverse album,” Buffy says. “These were songs that I loved that I had written. You could put just about anything on an album then. There was nobody telling you what to sing. Radio was quite diverse. You’d hear flamenco next to British folk next to Delta blues next to a singer/songwriter. Then the Beatles came along, and playlists became gentrified, and got very small.”
From early on, Buffy’s importance in our culture was more than just musical. She became the moral center of a social-justice movement that rose up in North America in the Sixties, establishing herself as an influential activist.
Her debut album had kicked off with “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” with Buffy singing, “Oh it’s all in the past you can say / But it’s still going on here today / The governments now want the Lakota land / That of the Inuit and the Cheyenne.” She wrote the song about a specific incident: the building of the Kinzua Dam, which pushed the Senecas off their land in the 1960s, breaking one of the oldest treaties in America’s history.
For her third album Little Wheel Spin and Spin in 1966, Buffy unleashed “My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying,” a powerful six-minute-long living history lesson that covered the devastation of residential schools, three decades before Canada’s last residential school closed in 1996.
Most of her audiences back then, whether at the Gaslight coffee house, Fillmore East, and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York or the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, had no previous exposure to American Indigenous issues. Nor were her views always welcomed.
For years, Buffy lived a public life performing to mainstream audiences in North America, and internationally in Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia and the United Kingdom—and doing concerts for American and international Indigenous groups, spotlighting native issues, and providing platforms for others.
As did many artists back then, Buffy recorded traditional repertoire. She also introduced songs by Joni Mitchell as well as music from Mickey Newbury, Bukka White, Patrick Sky, and later Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Randy Newman and Cliff Eberhardt.
To the surprise of many, she has also heavily experimented with electronic music over the years embracing new technologies as part of her creative process. [SH4] In 1969, she used a Buchla Modular Electronic Music System synthesizer to record Illuminations, the first totally quadraphonic electronic vocal album. She recorded an electronic powwow sample for “Starwalker” in 1976. She continued experimenting with electronic music with her 1992 album, Coincidence and Likely Stories, which was recorded mostly over the internet.
“I didn’t want to leave my home in Hawaii, so we used CompuServe,” she recalls. “We sent the MIDI files over the phone line, and then I flew to London to do the final vocals.”[SH5]
From 1975 to 1981 Buffy appeared as a semi-regular on Sesame Street, working in episodes dealing with breast feeding, sibling rivalry, and Native American culture. She brought Big Bird and friends to the Taos Pueblo reservation in New Mexico, and taught The Count how to count in Cree. Her stint on the show came to an end when the Reagan administration made budget cuts that hit PBS, which put an end to travel and rural filming.
By the more apolitical late ‘70s, Buffy had also hit the first of many rough patches in the music industry, finding herself adrift without a record deal. After Sweet America in 1976, she took 16 years off before releasing another recording again.
Instead of being depressed, she felt freed. “I could just be me,” she says.
In 2015, Buffy won the Polaris Music Prize for Power in the Blood, an electrifying album with club rockers and electronic powwow anthems, released on True North Records. The follow-up Medicine Songs, also released on True North, reconnected new fans to her activist songs and underscored her unshakable conviction once more as a fighter for social and economic justice.
In 2020, she released a children’s book, Hey Little Rockabye, an illustrated lullaby for pet adoption.
White Pine Pictures, Eagle Vision and Paquin Entertainment recently announced the start of production on the documentary feature film, BUFFY SAINTE-MARIE: CARRY IT ON. The film will have exclusive access to the legendary Academy Award-winning musician and activist blending the multifaceted eras of Buffy’s life experiences and will immerse the audience in the depths of her equanimity, devotion to innovation, passion for philosophy, and love for the world.
Buffy will speak on the power of creativity in the face of adversity, and what we all can do to effect change. The film will be a cinematic, poetic and musically infused journey, blending an extraordinary collection of archival material, some never seen before, with present-day footage of Buffy performing and interviews with her bandmates, colleagues, and Buffy herself.
“Creating is really what I do for fun.”
At the mention of future plans for recording, Buffy laughs, “In another 16 years, I will only be 96. It won’t be too late.”
Then she adds: “I am exactly the same kind of creative as I was at age three. When little kids go to the beach, and we see them using their imagination in making castles and pictures in the sand. All of that creative stuff everybody has, but only few of us are able to hang on to it. Social pressures, our parents, and schooling knocks it down. I’m still the same. I think where I lucked out is that I have never lost the sense of playfulness, and joy in creativity. Creating is really what I do for fun. I hear songs in my head, and I think, ‘Oh boy, I am going to have fun with this.’ Or, if I have an idea for a picture or painting or writing, I do it because I love doing it.”