A major singer-songwriter of the 1960s and the creator of several of that decade's best-known and most incisive protest anthems, Buffy Sainte-Marie (born c. 1941) remains one of just a few Native Americans to have attained international popularity in the field of popular music.
Sainte-Marie's influence on the 1960s music scene has sometimes been underestimated, for several of her best songs became familiar in versions by other artists. Her antiwar song "The Universal Soldier," for example, became a hit for the Scottish folk singer Donovan. Sainte-Marie was an independent, eclectic musician; even if she was generally categorized under the folk label, she ventured into and rock, and in the 1990s she became an early adopter of the personal computer and its potential uses in musical expression. Tying most of Sainte-Marie's activities together has been her ongoing concern with Native American rights and with presenting an accurate picture of Native American culture to the rest of the world.
Adopted by Massachusetts Family
A member of the Cree Indian tribe, Sainte-Marie was born on a reservation in Qu'Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, Canada. The year of her birth has been variously given as 1941 and 1942. Orphaned as a baby, she was adopted by a Massachusetts family named Sainte-Marie that was partially of Mi'kmaq Native American descent. As a child, though, Sainte-Marie knew little of her own Native background, and her rediscovery of that background later on became an important stimulus for her creative activity. Given the name Beverly Sainte-Marie and nicknamed Buffy, she was later ceremonially adopted by a Cree family related to one of her birth parents. Sainte-Marie lived for much of her life in the United States, becoming a dual U.S. and Canadian citizen, but she told an Ottawa Citizen interviewer in 1993 that she would always identify herself as Canadian.
Sainte-Marie had some piano lessons as a child and also enjoyed writing poetry. She learned the guitar in her teens, and during family vacations in Maine she began writing songs. The timing was good, for when Sainte-Marie began attending the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, coffeehouses with live folk music entertainment were beginning to flower across New England. Sainte-Marie was a coffeehouse favorite as a college student, but she did not neglect her studies, either; she graduated in 1962 with a degree in Eastern philosophy and was recognized as one of the top ten students in her class. She later received a fine arts Ph.D. from the same institution.
After she finished college, Sainte-Marie headed for the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City, a mecca at the time for aspiring folk singers. With her unique outlook - virtually no other songwriters dealt with Native American life at the time - and her distinctively edgy vocal vibrato, Sainte-Marie won attention from the start in clubs such as the Gaslight Cafe and Gerdes Folk City. She toured and maintained her Canadian ties, writing "The Universal Soldier" during an appearance one night at Toronto's Purple Onion coffeehouse.
Executives at the folk-oriented label Vanguard signed Sainte-Marie to a contract and released her debut album, It's My Way! in 1964. William Ruhlmann of the All Music Guide website called it "one of the most scathing topical folk albums ever made;" its subject matter ranged from incest to drug addiction ("Cod'ine," based on Sainte-Marie's own experiences in the aftermath of a serious bout with bronchial pneumonia in 1963, was later covered by several rock bands), and it included "The Universal Soldier" and another of Sainte-Marie's trademark songs, "Now That the Buffalo's Gone." Sainte-Marie's second album, Many a Mile (1965) mixed traditional songs with Sainte-Marie originals such as "Until It's Time for You to Go." That song was never well known in Sainte-Marie's own version, but it was covered by a long list of musicians that included Elvis Presley, Cher, Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand, British icon Vera Lynn, and jazz vocalist Carmen McRae. Presley's version became a major hit in Europe in 1972 and helped put Sainte-Marie on a firm financial footing.
Traveled to Nashville to Record
Sainte-Marie's next two albums, Little Wheel Spin and Spin (1966) and Fire & Fleet & Candlelight (1967, with orchestral arrangements by classical-music satirist Peter Schickele), continued to draw attention, and she appeared at major venues such as New York's Carnegie Hall. Having always enjoyed country music, Sainte-Marie recorded in Nashville with country studio musicians for her 1968 album I'm Gonna Be a Country Girl Again. At the time, bands such as the Byrds had experimented with country-folk and country-rock fusions, but folk icon Bob Dylan's well-publicized Nashville sessions (and Nashville Skyline album) were still at least a year in the future. The album included "Soulful Shade of Blue" and "Sometimes When I Get to Thinkin'," two of Sainte-Marie's most characteristic love songs - a category for which she was known just as much as for her protest songs in the 1960s. Country star Bobby Bare enjoyed a hit with Sainte-Marie's country composition "The Piney Wood Hills," originally recorded on Many a Mile.
Appearing on such mainstream media outlets as the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Sainte-Marie was, if not a star, at least one of the best-known folk musicians in the country. Her songs were often heard on the radio up to that point, but they disappeared as her criticism of the Vietnam War sharpened. According to Sainte-Marie's website, she was blacklisted because her name appeared on a White House list of performers "who deserved to be suppressed." Nevertheless, Sainte-Marie continued to record for Vanguard. Her albums from the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s were an adventurous group; Illuminations (1969) employed the psychedelic rock styles of the time and gave advance notice of Sainte-Marie's interest in musical electronics. The 1972 album Moonshot was mostly a straight-ahead rock effort except for the country-oriented "He's an Indian Cowboy in the Rodeo." That song was one of a group that gained Sainte-Marie a strong fan base among Native Americans, one which persisted even when she fell out of view in the pop mainstream.
Albums such as She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina (1971) and Native North American Child (1973) continued to feature unusual new Sainte-Marie compositions; the title track of the former album put Sainte-Marie back on the pop charts, while that of the latter was a satirical piece pointing to the invisibility of Native Americans in the mass media: "Sing about your ebony African queen/Sing about your lily-white Lili Marleen/Beauty by the dozen, but the girl of the hour/Is your Native North American prairie flower." Sainte-Marie moved to the MCA label in 1974 and issued the experimental Mongrel Pup the following year, with cryptic lyrics like "Laughter is the grease of growth/Support your local clown."
Sainte-Marie moved to Hawaii in the late 1960s and continued to make her home there despite frequent projects that took her back to the mainland. A marriage to surfing instructor Dewain Bugbee ended in 1972. Sainte-Marie married actor Sheldon Peters Wolfchild in 1975, and they had a son, Dakota Starblanket Wolfchild. In 1976 Sainte-Marie withdrew from the recording scene in order to concentrate on raising a family, but she did not remain outside the creative sphere for long.
Won Academy Award
Appearing with her son, Sainte-Marie joined the cast of the long-running children's television program Sesame Street. She appeared on the show between 1976 and 1981. In a way Sesame Street launched the second phase of her career, which was increasingly often concerned with Native American issues. She used the show to introduce children to aspects of Native American life that she felt were poorly served by existing educational materials. Sainte-Marie continued to write songs, and "Up Where We Belong," co-written with Will Jennings and veteran producer Jack Nitzsche, was recorded by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes and used in the 1982 film "An Officer and a Gentleman," bringing Sainte-Marie an Academy Award for Best Original Song. Some obituaries of Nitzsche reported that he and Sainte-Marie were briefly married in the early 1980s.
Sainte-Marie's activities in the 1980s were varied. She appeared in several films, including Broken Rainbow (1985), about the long-running land dispute between the Hopi and Navajo tribes. She wrote about Native American issues for a variety of publications, and she penned a children's book, Nokomis and the Magic Hat, in 1986. The long effort to free imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier listed Sainte-Marie as a stalwart supporter, and she taught courses at several institutions on a wide variety of subjects that included songwriting, musical electronics, and women's studies. She also appeared in a commercial for the Ben & Jerry's ice cream chain.
One of Sainte-Marie's visiting professorships was at the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she taught a course in digital technology and art. Perhaps unexpectedly for someone whose creative beginnings lay in the low-tech world of folk music, Sainte-Marie became an enthusiastic user of computers in both her visual-artistic and musical endeavors. Her digital art works, some of them as large as nine feet tall when realized in printed form, were exhibited in Canadian and American museums and galleries including the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, and the G.O.C.A.I.A. Gallery in Tucson, Arizona.
In 1992 Sainte-Marie returned to the recording arena, working from a home studio in Hawaii controlled by a Macintosh PowerBook computer. The album Coincidence and Likely Stories, released on the Chrysalis label, yielded a British hit in "The Big Ones Get Away." Sainte-Marie became an exponent of the idea that online communication could decentralize power in society generally and facilitate the spread of Native American culture specifically. "It does give an image of Stone Age to space age," she conceded to the London Independent. But she pointed out that Native Americans had been involved with computer technology almost since its inception. "It's natural for any indigenous community to be online, because of our desire to remain in the local community, yet be part of the global community," she pointed out.
Sainte-Marie released Up Where We Belong, an album of remakes of her earlier hits, in 1996. The following year she was awarded the Order of Canada. Her educational efforts continued to expand; her Cradleboard Teaching Project, which included digital material, was a set of resources for educators who wanted to address deficiencies in the ways Native American history was usually taught - deficiencies that Sainte-Marie had encountered firsthand when she had looked at her own son's schoolbooks. "It was the same old dead text on dead Indians," she told USA Today. "It was shallow, inaccurate, and not interesting." Sainte-Marie also set up a foundation that supported Native Americans who wanted to attend law school. She continued to perform about 20 concerts annually, one of which was captured on her Live at Carnegie Hall album of 2004, and the sizes of the crowds she drew - a concert in Denmark, was estimated at over 200,000 people - testified to the lasting impact she had made on the musical world.
Periodicals
Albuquerque Journal, March 31, 2001.
Billboard, June 13, 1992.
Independent (London, England), March 8, 1996.
Ottawa Citizen (Canada), June 30, 1993; March 29, 1994; July 5, 1997; August 24, 2002.
People, June 17, 1996.
Times (London, England), February 16, 1996.
USA Today, December 12, 2000.
Wind Speaker, March 1996.
Online
"Biography," Official Buffy Sainte-Marie website, http://www.creative-native.com/biograp.htm (December 20, 2005).
"Buffy Sainte-Marie," All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com (December 20, 2005).
