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Buffy Sainte-Marie
singer-songwriter, visual artist | born 1941
BornBeverly Sainte-Marie on February 20, 1941 in Piapot Cree First Nations Reserve, Saskatchewan, Canada
Biographyby Rachel Giese
Buffy Sainte-Marie was the first international Aboriginal pop star, as famous for her social justice activism as for her radio-friendly songs. Her Grammy award–winning ballad, “Up Where We Belong,” from the soundtrack for the movie An Officer and a Gentleman (co-written with Jack Nitzsche and Will Jennings) also earned her an Academy Award, making her the first Native person to win one. She is an Officer of in the Order of Canada and holds several honourary degrees. She has lived on the Hawaiian island of Kauai for more than 40 years and continues to perform, teach, create art and raise awareness about First Nation issues.
IN DEPTH
In the mid-seventies, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s promising music career—launched in 1964 with the album It’s My Way!, which earned her Billboard’s Best New Artist title—had stalled. Her outspoken stances on Aboriginal rights and the war in Vietnam drew the attention of the FBI and a spot on a White House blacklist. Despite a string of hits as a singer and a songwriter, her radio exposure dried up. That airplay exile led the Canadian-American Cree artist to take on her most subversive role of all: a regular cast member on Sesame Street.
For five years on the show, she sang with Muppets, taught children about Aboriginal peoples and history, and, famously, nursed her son on camera while explaining to Big Bird the ins and outs of breastfeeding. At a time when First Nations were viewed in public life and popular culture as either caricatures or museum pieces—if they were visible at all—Sainte-Marie offered her young audience an image of contemporary Aboriginal womanhood that was smart, warm, joyful, and, most powerful of all, vibrantly alive.
The title of her debut album proved prescient: throughout her career, Sainte-Marie has defied easy categorization. The long-haired hippie who penned “Universal Soldier,” the haunting anti-war anthem made famous by Donovan, is also the canny composer of swoony love songs like the Elvis Presley standard “Until It’s Time for You to Go” and the Oscar-winning “Up Where We Belong.”
Endlessly driven to innovate, the erstwhile folkie (who also detoured into country and rock) became a pioneer of digital music and art, using a Buchla synthesizer to record her 1969 album Illuminations. She was effortlessly glamourous, incorporating traditional elements like feathers, beadwork and leather into her outfits, but refused to play a docile Pocahontas. Instead, she brought her politically-fuelled music to protest marches and First Nations reserves and worked alongside African-American civil right giants like Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali, Harry Belafonte and Dick Gregory. She continues to be an advocate for Aboriginal issues and has founded a program to create school curriculum based on First Peoples’ cultural values.
She’s an inspiration to younger Aboriginal performers—with their infectious danceclub mix of house music and traditional powwow songs, JUNO-winning DJ trio A Tribe Called Red are obvious heirs. But her influence reaches far beyond her community: British-born, New York–based singer Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, who shares Sainte-Marie’s distinctive quavery vibrato, is a fan and collaborator, as is Canadian composer and fellow genre-buster Owen Pallett. What unites Sainte-Marie’s younger generation of admirers is that they echo her outsider’s demand to be heard.
In her 2012 biography, It’s My Way, recounting an early school field trip to a museum, Sainte-Marie recalls feeling heartbroken about the exhibits of First Peoples, displayed next to dinosaurs, rather than celebrated as living, modern people. That childhood moment of disappointment may have created the spark for her glorious, insistent voice. “I knew I existed,” she explains. “I wanted to exist.”
Buffy Sainte-Marie was the first international Aboriginal pop star, as famous for her social justice activism as for her radio-friendly songs. Her Grammy award–winning ballad, “Up Where We Belong,” from the soundtrack for the movie An Officer and a Gentleman (co-written with Jack Nitzsche and Will Jennings) also earned her an Academy Award, making her the first Native person to win one. She is an Officer of in the Order of Canada and holds several honourary degrees. She has lived on the Hawaiian island of Kauai for more than 40 years and continues to perform, teach, create art and raise awareness about First Nation issues.
IN DEPTH
In the mid-seventies, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s promising music career—launched in 1964 with the album It’s My Way!, which earned her Billboard’s Best New Artist title—had stalled. Her outspoken stances on Aboriginal rights and the war in Vietnam drew the attention of the FBI and a spot on a White House blacklist. Despite a string of hits as a singer and a songwriter, her radio exposure dried up. That airplay exile led the Canadian-American Cree artist to take on her most subversive role of all: a regular cast member on Sesame Street.
For five years on the show, she sang with Muppets, taught children about Aboriginal peoples and history, and, famously, nursed her son on camera while explaining to Big Bird the ins and outs of breastfeeding. At a time when First Nations were viewed in public life and popular culture as either caricatures or museum pieces—if they were visible at all—Sainte-Marie offered her young audience an image of contemporary Aboriginal womanhood that was smart, warm, joyful, and, most powerful of all, vibrantly alive.
The title of her debut album proved prescient: throughout her career, Sainte-Marie has defied easy categorization. The long-haired hippie who penned “Universal Soldier,” the haunting anti-war anthem made famous by Donovan, is also the canny composer of swoony love songs like the Elvis Presley standard “Until It’s Time for You to Go” and the Oscar-winning “Up Where We Belong.”
Endlessly driven to innovate, the erstwhile folkie (who also detoured into country and rock) became a pioneer of digital music and art, using a Buchla synthesizer to record her 1969 album Illuminations. She was effortlessly glamourous, incorporating traditional elements like feathers, beadwork and leather into her outfits, but refused to play a docile Pocahontas. Instead, she brought her politically-fuelled music to protest marches and First Nations reserves and worked alongside African-American civil right giants like Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali, Harry Belafonte and Dick Gregory. She continues to be an advocate for Aboriginal issues and has founded a program to create school curriculum based on First Peoples’ cultural values.
She’s an inspiration to younger Aboriginal performers—with their infectious danceclub mix of house music and traditional powwow songs, JUNO-winning DJ trio A Tribe Called Red are obvious heirs. But her influence reaches far beyond her community: British-born, New York–based singer Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, who shares Sainte-Marie’s distinctive quavery vibrato, is a fan and collaborator, as is Canadian composer and fellow genre-buster Owen Pallett. What unites Sainte-Marie’s younger generation of admirers is that they echo her outsider’s demand to be heard.
In her 2012 biography, It’s My Way, recounting an early school field trip to a museum, Sainte-Marie recalls feeling heartbroken about the exhibits of First Peoples, displayed next to dinosaurs, rather than celebrated as living, modern people. That childhood moment of disappointment may have created the spark for her glorious, insistent voice. “I knew I existed,” she explains. “I wanted to exist.”
Contemporary Country Singer-Songwriter | born 1961
Singer-Songwriter and TV Personality | born 1962
