Buffy Sainte-Marie

Template:Infobox musical artist 2 Buffy Sainte-Marie (born Beverly Sainte-Marie, February 20 1941) is an Academy Award-winning Canadian First Nations musician, composer, visual artist, educator and social activist.

She was born on the Piapot Cree reserve in the Qu'Appelle valley, Saskatchewan. She was orphaned and later adopted and grew up in Maine and Massachusetts with parents Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie who were related to her biological parents. From the University of Massachusetts she holds degrees in teaching and Oriental Philosophy graduating in the top ten of her class and went on to earn a Ph.D. in Fine Arts. In 1996 she received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Regina. In 2007 she received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

"Artists are the people who are able to resist the school system fragmenting us because it's convenient to do so, when the art teacher is in competition with the music teacher, and all creativity is in competition with the 'real' curriculum."

Early career

Sainte-Marie played piano and guitar, self-taught, in her childhood and teen years. In college some of her songs, "Ananias", the Indian lament, "Now That the Buffalo's Gone" and "Mayoo Sto Hoon" (in Hindi) were already in her repertoire.

By 1962, in her early twenties, Sainte-Marie was touring alone, developing her craft and performing in various concert halls, folk festivals and Native reservations across the U.S, Canada and abroad. She spent a considerable amount of time in the coffeehouses of downtown Toronto's old Yorkville district, and New York City's Greenwich Village as part of the early to mid-1960s folk scene, often alongside other emerging Canadian contemporaries, such as Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

She quickly earned a reputation as a gifted songwriter, and many of her earliest songs were covered, and often turned into hits, by other artists, including Chet Atkins, Janis Joplin, Taj Mahal and others. Probably her most popular song, "Until It's Time for You to Go", has been recorded by artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra, Roberta Flack, Cher and Bobby Darin, while "Piney Wood Hills" was made into a country hit by Bobby Bare.

In 1963, recovering from a throat infection Sainte-Marie became addicted to codeine and recovering from the experience became the basis of her song "Cod'ine", later covered by Quicksilver Messenger Service. Also in 1963 Sainte-Marie witnessed wounded soldiers returning from Vietnam at a time when the U.S. government was denying involvement - this inspired her protest song "Universal Soldier" which was released on her debut album, It’s My Way on Vanguard Records in 1964, and later became a hit for Donovan. She was subsequently named Billboard Magazine's Best New Artist.

In 1967, Sainte-Marie released the album Fire and Fleet and Candlelight, which contained what is probably the definitive interpretation of the traditional song "Lyke Wake Dirge" and the hit "Now That the Buffalo's Gone", a protest over broken treaties with First Nations people. Sainte-Marie's other well-known songs include "Mister Can't You See," (a Top 40 U.S. hit in 1972); "He's an Indian Cowboy in the Rodeo"; and the theme song of the popular movie "Soldier Blue". Perhaps her first appearance on TV was as herself on To Tell the Truth in January 1966.

She became an active member of the Baha'i Faith by the mid-1970s and has continued to appear at concerts, conferences and conventions of that religion since then.

In the late sixties, Saint-Marie used a Buchla synthesizer to record the album Illuminations, which did not receive much notice. "People were more in love with the Pocahontas-with-a-guitar image," she commented in a 1998 interview.

Sainte-Marie married musician Jack Nitzsche in 1969 and regularly appeared on the children's TV series Sesame Street over a five year period from 1976 - 1981, along with her son, Dakota Starblanket Wolfchild. She also began using Apple Inc. Apple II and Macintosh computers as early as 1981 to record her music and later some of her visual art.

The song "Up Where We Belong" (which Sainte-Marie co-wrote with Will Jennings and Jack Nitzsche) was performed by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes for the film An Officer and a Gentleman. It received the Academy Award for Best Song in 1982. The song was latered covered by Cliff Richard and Anne Murray on Cliff's album of duets, Two's Company.

Later career

In 1992, after a sixteen-year recording hiatus, Sainte-Marie released the album Coincidence and Likely Stories. Recorded at home on her computer, the album included the politically-charged songs "The Big Ones Get Away" and "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" (which mentions Leonard Peltier), both commenting on the ongoing plight of Native Americans (see also the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.) Also in 1992, Sainte-Marie appeared in the television movie The Broken Chain with Pierce Brosnan along with fellow Native American Bahá'í Phil Lucas. Her next album followed up in 1996 with Up Where We Belong, an album on which she re-recorded a number of her greatest hits in more unplugged and acoustic versions, including "Universal Soldier".

A gifted digital artist, Sainte-Marie has exhibited her art at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Emily Carr Gallery in Vancouver and the American Indian Arts Museum in Santa Fe.

She founded the Cradleboard Teaching Project in October of 1996, from a two year grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan. With projects across Mohawk, Cree, Ojibwe, Menominee, Coeur D'Alene, Navajo, Quinault, Hawaiian, and Apache communities in eleven states, partnered with a non-Indian class of the same grade level for Elementary, Middle, and High School grades in the disciplines of Geography, History, Social Studies, Music and Science and produced a multimedia curriculum CD, Science: Through Native American Eyes.

In 2000, Sainte-Marie gave the commencement address at Haskell Indian Nations University. and in 2002 she sang at the Kennedy Space Center for Chicasaw Commander John Herrington, the first Native American astronaut. In 2003 she became a spokesperson for the UNESCO Associated Schools Project Network in Canada.

In 2004, a track written and performed by her and entitled "Lazarus" was sampled by Hip Hop producer Kanye West and performed by Cam'Ron and Jim Jones of The Diplomats. The track is called "Dead or Alive".

Censorship

Sainte-Marie has claimed that she was blacklisted and that she, along with other American Indians in the Red Power movements, was put out of business in the 1970s.

"I found out 10 years later, in the 1980s, that [President] Lyndon B. Johnson had been writing letters on White House stationery praising radio stations for suppressing my music," Sainte-Marie said in a 1999 interview with Indian Country Today at Dine' College... "In the 1970s, not only was the protest movement put out of business, but the Native American movement was attacked."

Additionally, she claims that in the United States, her records were disappearing. According to her, thousands of people at concerts wanted records, and although the distributor claimed that the records had been shipped, no one seemed to know where they were.

Said Sainte-Marie, "I was put out of business in the United States."

Awards and Honors

France named Buffy Sainte-Marie Best International Artist of 1993. That same year, she was selected by the United Nations to proclaim officially the International Year of Indigenous Peoples.

Sainte-Marie was inducted into the Juno Hall of Fame for her life-long contribution to music in 1995 and won a Gemini Award in 1997 for the Canadian TV special Buffy Sainte-Marie: Up Where We Belong. This also marked the first time she had performed her famous song to a live audience.

She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation in Canada in 1998, and was also made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

In 1999, she received a star on Canada's Walk of Fame.

Album discography

• It’s My Way, 1964
• Many a Mile, 1965
• Little Wheel Spin and Spin, 1966
• Fire & Fleet & Candlelight, 1967
• I'm Gonna Be a Country Girl Again, 1968
• Illuminations, 1969
• The Best of Buffy Sainte-Marie, 1970
• The Best of Buffy Sainte-Marie Vol.2, 1971
• She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina, 1971
• Moonshot, 1972
• Quiet Places, 1973
• Native North American Child: An Odyssey, 1974
• Buffy, 1974
• Changing Woman, 1975
• Sweet America, 1976
• Coincidence and Likely Stories, 1992
• Up Where We Belong, 1996
• The Best of the Vanguard Years, 2003
• Live at Carnegie Hall, 2004

External links

• Buffy Sainte-Marie: A Multimedia Life, documentary produced by CineFocus-Paquin Pictures Inc.
• Official website
• Internet Movie Database Entry
• Buffy Sainte-Marie's Cradleboard Teaching Project
• www.buffysaintemarie.co.uk
• Tribute Site
• Mouthbows to Cyberskins