Opening acclaim for her recent documentary, Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On, certainly gave a dazzling impression of who Buffy Sainte-Marie is: “Always way ahead of the game, she knew she had a gift and was not afraid to share it, to show it - to be proud of it; the boldest woman I know - in a quiet and compassionate way; an icon, a 6-time Juno Award winner, an Academy Award winner, a trailblazer - a champion to the Order of Canada; throughout her work, she’s always at the cutting edge - her songs encapsulate all of time.”

Currently, Sainte-Marie lives happily in the remote Hawaiian mountains with her goats and her sweetheart. Her confidence in solitude is what she believes has allowed her to enjoy music for so long. Sainte-Marie loves show business but also needs the other side of life. Songs are like “snapshots of your life” she says, and Sainte-Marie has written about everything. At eighty years of age, she is not at all surprised about where she finds herself professionally. “Sometimes, you have to carry the medicine for a long time, before it’s finally time to administer it,” she explains. At some point along the way, Sainte-Marie realized that the timing (of her music) was off. In the sixties, people were flabbergasted that Sainte-Marie used the word “genocide” regarding the holocaust, and it took another fifty years before the Indigenous Truth and Reconciliation movement brought long ignored atrocities against Indigenous peoples to light and vindicated her music. 

As an adopted child, Sainte-Marie was born in Canada but raised in Maine and Massachusetts, where it was believed that Indigenous people no longer existed. “The town I grew up in was (like) Javex city and they tried to turn me white,” she reflects. Being the only Indigenous child around was isolating, and often made her feel like an observer. Rather than playing with other children, Sainte-Marie recalls playing with her family’s piano as a toy - which she believes all children should do. Music became her playmate and Sainte-Marie, who could naturally replicate any music by ear, soon began to create her own. 

There were two things Sainte-Marie recalls being told as a child that should have ruined her: that she couldn’t be a musician because she couldn’t read music, and that she couldn’t be an “Indian” because there weren’t any left. In dealing with other people’s ignorance, often even in people she loved, Sainte-Marie always instinctively knew that Indigenous peoples are natural musicians, and that “the world was either wrong or just not there yet.” When she asked her mother what kind of “Indian” she was, Sainte-Marie was told that when she grew up, she could find out for herself. As an adult, she was adopted into a Cree family from a reserve in Qu’Appelle Valley Saskatchewan.

At the University of Massachusetts, Sainte-Marie discovered her real freedom as well as her love of philosophy and teaching. It was during her college years that Sainte-Marie became deeply committed to and a representative of Indigenous rights. These themes were reflected in the songs that she regularly performed for her student peers as well as at local coffeehouses. After earning her degree in philosophy and teaching, Sainte-Marie moved on to New York. She knew by then that she was good at writing songs but was still unsure as to whether she could make it as a singer-performer. 

“I was always impressed with her… Buffy was different,” says Joni Mitchell. The ‘hippie era’ was just emerging in Greenwich Village, New York, and Sainte-Marie often found herself performing amongst other young, up-and-coming folk musicians such as Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Seager. The Gaslight (Poetry) Café, which would become one of New York City’s most famous bars and lounges, soon welcomed Sainte-Marie with a huge billboard that attracted tons of people, lots of media attention and multiple record deals. She would soon be known as “one of the most intriguing young folk singers to emerge in many a moon,” as reported by Time Magazine.

Around the time that Sainte-Marie signed her first album deal with Vanguard, the activist opposition toward the Vietnam war was in full swing. It’s My Way, was described as “swinging poetry that chronicled the times’’ and included huge hits such as “Universal Soldier” and “Cod’ine.” Sainte-Marie believed the responsibility for the war to be “universal” and to belong to all of us collectively. The song “Cod’ine,’’ which foreshadows the current opioid crisis, was inspired by Sainte-Marie’s own experiences of the “unimaginable hell” of opiate withdrawal when she was over-prescribed opiates for a bronchial infection. 

In the days when record companies seemed to have all the power, Sainte-Marie felt that she had “little control over her music” and was taken advantage of by the “big businessmen’’ of the music industry. Not only was she under lots of pressure to produce albums by Vanguard, but there was also social pressure to drink and take drugs. Sainte-Marie didn’t care for either and was thus unable to represent herself at after-parties where music business deals often took place. One of her most naive business mistakes was signing away the publishing rights to “Universal Soldier” to the Highwaymen for only $1.00. Sainte-Marie, however, turned down selling the publishing rights for the song “Until it’s Time for You to Go’’ to Elvis, Barbara Streisand, Cher, and Neil Diamond. The song has been covered 157 times since its release in 1965. 

Things changed in the 1970s, however, when the FBI blacklisted Sainte-Marie as a US security risk for her passionate support of the American Indian Movement. In her song, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” Sainte-Marie used her platform to give voice to Indigenous rights with her willingness to “speak truth to power.” Radio stations were consequently urged by the FBI to remove all of her records from airplay. Despite being suppressed and nearly erased from the mainstream music industry, Sainte-Marie found other ways to Carry It On - “I made a lot of money in the sixties but I was more concerned with giving back,” she reflects. 

When not on tour Sainte-Marie spent a lot of her time visiting with and performing for different North American Indigenous Reserves. She agreed to act in a 1968 episode of The Virginian, but only if Indigenous roles were played by Indigenous actors. Sainte-Marie also starred in and introduced Indigenous educational programming to Sesame Street because she “wanted little kids to understand that “Indians” exist.”

The song “Up Where We Belong,” which Saint-Marie co-wrote, won a 1983 Oscar; her come-back album, Power in the Blood, won a 2015 Polaris prize over Drake. In 2021, Saint-Marie was honoured as an Indigenous artist by the Academy and Oneida Indian Nation for having made an impact on the film industry. Buffy’s greatest pride, however, was not in the reception of her awards, but in the knowledge that one of her Nihewan Foundation scholarship recipients had gone on to initiate a Tribal College. 

“Some will tell you that you really ain’t on the menu. Don’t believe them. Cook it up yourself and then prepare to serve them” – Buffy Sainte-Marie.