From Universal Soldier to Cradleboard project

Buffy Sainte-Marie was a graduating college senior in 1962 and hit the ground running in the early sixties, after the beatniks and before the hippies. All alone she toured North America’s colleges, reservations and concert halls, meeting both huge acclaim and huge misperception from audiences and record companies who expected Pocahontas in fringes, and instead were both entertained and educated with their initial dose of Native North American reality in the first person.
By age 24, Buffy Sainte-Marie had appeared all over Europe, Canada, Australia and Asia, receiving honors, medals and awards which continue to this day. Her song Until It’s Time for You to Go was recorded by Elvis and Barbra and Cher, and her Universal Soldier became the anthem of the peace movement. For her very first album she was voted Billboard’s best new artist.
She disappeared suddenly from the mainstream airwaves during the Lyndon Johnson years. As part of a blacklist, which affected Eartha Kitt, Taj Mahal and a host of other outspoken performers, her name was included on White House stationery as among those whose music “deserved to be suppressed.” In Indian country and abroad, however, her fame only grew. She continued to appear at countless grassroots concerts, AIM events and other activist benefits. She made 17 albums of her music, three of her own television specials, spent five years on Sesame Street, scored movies, helped to found Canada’s Music of Aboriginal Canada Juno category, raised a son, earned a PhD in fine arts, taught digital music as adjunct professor at several colleges, and won an Academy Award Oscar for the song Up Where We Belong.
Buffy Sainte-Marie virtually invented the role of Native North American international activist pop star. Her concern for protecting indigenous intellectual property, and her distaste for the exploitation of Native American artists and performers has kept her in the forefront of activism in the arts for forty years. Presently she operates the Nihewan Foundation for Native American Education whose Cradleboard Teaching Project serves children and teachers in eighteen states.

Deeper background about Buffy
Born on a Cree reservation in Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, Buffy Sainte-Marie was adopted and raised in Maine and Massachusetts. She received a PhD in fine art from the University of Massachusetts. She also holds degrees in both Oriental philosophy and teaching, influences which form the backbone of her music, visual art and social activism.
As a college student in the early 1960s, Buffy Sainte-Marie became known as a writer of protest songs and love songs. Many of these became huge hits and classics of the era, performed by hundreds of other artists including Barbra Streisand, Elvis Presley, Chet Atkins, Janis Joplin, Roberta Flack, Neil Diamond, Tracy Chapman and The Boston Pops Orchestra.
Buffy had a unique career in the USA, Europe, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong and Japan. She wrote songs and essays, established a scholarship foundation to fund Native American study, spent time with indigenous people in far away countries, received a medal from Queen Elizabeth II and presented a colloquium to Europe’s philosophers.
In 1976 she quit recording to be a mommy and an artist, and to continue as a student of experimental music. Buffy and her son Dakota Starblanket Wolfchild became well known for their five-year stint on Sesame Street, where they taught us that “Indians still exist.” As a composer, she won an Academy Award in 1982 for the song Up Where We Belong as recorded by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes for the film An Officer and a Gentleman.
With Dakota grown up, Buffy re-entered the music scene in 1993 with her comeback album Coincidence and Likely Stories (EMI).
Her art and music are also teaching tools, and she uses these continually to enlighten.
An educator before she was ever known as a singer, Buffy lectures at colleges and civic venues on a wide variety of topics. She serves as adjunct professor in Canada at York University in Toronto and Saskatchewan Indian Federated College in Regina, and in the US was an Evans Chair scholar at the Evergreen State College in Washington State. She has also taught at the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
An early Macintosh pioneer in digital art and music, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s works were among the first to be seen in museums and galleries across North America. She likens electronic painting to “painting with light.” Working on her Macintosh at home, using mainly Photoshop software, she combines colours and light, sometimes with scanned-in realities (photos, fabrics, feathers and beads to create huge, brilliantly coloured paintings, which she describes as being “both reflective and deep, like new car paint”. Her works have graced the covers of Art Focus and Talking Stick magazines and been featured in MS magazine and USA Today.
As digital media caught on, Buffy assisted many other artists in understanding computers as an additional tool for real art. She was keynote speaker at the Interactive ‘96 conference in Toronto, where tangible versions of her artwork were exhibited amidst great media attention. Singing a concert with the Regina Symphony with her magnificent huge digital paintings exhibited in the foyer of the concert hall, her continuing theme Cyberskins: Live and Interactive crosses media boundaries but always emphasizes how Indians are alive and thriving even within the digital revolution.
In February 1996, Buffy released her latest album Up Where We Belong (EMI), a collection of new songs with new recordings of her best songs. She was recently awarded the Award for Lifetime Musical Achievement by the First Americans in the Arts, who also paid homage to Buffy and her legendary career by naming the award after her.
Since 1996 she has limited her concert appearances to about 20 per year, speaking engagements to about the same number, and focused her time mostly on the Cradleboard Teaching Project, using her multimedia skills to create accurate, enriching core curriculum based in Native American cultural perspectives. The interactive multimedia CD-ROM Science: Through Native American Eyes features Buffy on camera as well as producer and director. Visit www.cradleboard.org to learn more.
Buffy Sainte-Marie’s work is a reflection of her own life – extremely varied and unique – and her special skill is in joining seemingly unrelated ideas: A pacifist and a general. Indians and computers. Electronic art and Native realities.
In February 2005 Buffy’s song Universal Soldier was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Buffy Sainte-Marie will be appearing at the opening night gala benefit of the Talking Stick Festival, Sunday March 13
at 7:30 pm at the Chan Centre at UBC along with Ulali, Sandy Scofield and Kinnie Starr. Chan Centre
tickets: 604-280-3311 or online at www.ticketmaster.ca.
For more information visit Buffy’s website www.creative-native.com or the Talking Stick Festival www.fullcircle.ca
.