Native Canadians who have shaped Canadian History. Buffy St. Marie. Buffy Sainte-Marie, OC (born February 20, 1941) is a Canadian-American Cree singer-songwriter, musician, composer, visual artist,[1] educator, pacifist, and social activist. Throughout her career in all of these areas, her work has focused on issues of Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Her singing and writing repertoire also includes subjects of love, war, religion, and mysticism. She founded the Cradleboard Teaching Project, an educational curriculum devoted to better understanding Native Americans. She has won recognition and many awards and honours for both her music and her work in education and social activism. She was born Beverly Sainte-Marie in 1941[2][3] on the Piapot Cree First Nations Reserve in the QuAppelle Valley, Saskatchewan, Canada.[4] She was orphaned and later adopted, growing up in Wakefield, Massachusetts with parents Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie, who were related to her biological parents.[5] She attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst, earning degrees (BA 1963 and PhD 1983) in teaching and Oriental philosophy.[6] and graduating in the top ten of her class.[7] In 1964 on a return trip to the Piapot Cree reserve in Canada for a Powwow she was welcomed and (in a Cree Nation context) adopted by the youngest son of Chief Piapot, Emile Piapot and his wife, who added to Sainte-Maries cultural value of, and place in, native culture.[8] In 1968 she married surfing teacher Dewain Bugbee of Hawaii; they divorced in 1971. She married Sheldon Wolfchild from Minnesota in 1975; they have a son, Dakota Cody Starblanket Wolfchild. That union also ended and she married, thirdly, to Jack Nitzsche in the early 1980s, but her current partner is Chuck Wilson (since 1993).[8] She currently lives on Kauai.[9] She became an active friend of the Baháí Faith by the mid-1970s when she is said to have appeared in the 1973 Third National Baha’i Youth Conference at the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and has continued to appear at concerts, conferences and conventions of that religion since then. In 1992, she appeared in the musical event prelude to the Baháí World Congress, a double concert Live Unity: The Sound of the World in 1992 with video broadcast and documentary.[10] In the video documentary of the event Sainte-Marie is seen on the Dini Petty Show explaining the Baháí teaching of Progressive revelation.[11] She also appears in the 1985 video Mona With The Children by Douglas John Cameron Diaz 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 Buffalos Gone and Mayoo Sto Hoon (in Hindi) were already in her repertoire.[6] 1960s By 1962, in her early twenties, Sainte-Marie was touring alone, developing her craft and performing in various concert halls, folk music festivals and Native Americans reservations across the United States, Canada and abroad. She spent a considerable amount of time in the coffeehouses of downtown Torontos old Yorkville district, and New York Citys Greenwich Village as part of the early to mid-1960s folk scene, often alongside other emerging Canadian contemporaries, such as Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell (she also introduced Joni to Elliot Roberts, who became Jonis manager).[8] She quickly earned a reputation as a gifted songwriter, and many of her earliest songs were covered, and often turned into chart-topping hits, by other artists including Chet Atkins, Janis Joplin and Taj Mahal. One of her most popular songs, Until Its Time for You to Go, has been recorded by artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Michael Nesmith, Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra, Roberta Flack, Françoise Hardy, Cher, Maureen McGovern, and Bobby Darin, while Piney Wood Hills was made into a country music hit by Bobby Bare. Her vocal style features a frequently recurring, insistent, unusually sustained vibrato, one more prominent than can be found in the music of any other well-known popular music performer. Sainte-Marie performing in the Netherlands in the Grand Gala du Disque Populaire 1968 In 1963, recovering from a throat infection Sainte-Marie became addicted to codeine and recovering from the experience became the basis of her song Codine,[7] later covered by Donovan, Janis Joplin, The Charlatans, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Man,[12] the Litter, The Leaves, Jimmy Gilmer, Gram Parsons,[13] Charles Brutus McClay,[14] The Barracudas (spelt Codeine),[15] The Golden Horde,[16] and more recently by Courtney Love. Also in 1963 Sainte-Marie witnessed wounded soldiers returning from Vietnam at a time when the U.S. government was denying involvement[17] – this inspired her protest song Universal Soldier[18] which was released on her debut album, Its My Way on Vanguard Records in 1964, and later became a hit for Donovan.[19] She was subsequently named Billboard Magazines Best New Artist. Some of her songs such as My Country Tis of Thy People Youre Dying (1964, included on her 1966 album) addressing the mistreatment of Native Americans created a lot of controversy at the time.[5] In 1967, Sainte-Marie released the album Fire and Fleet and Candlelight, which contained her interpretation of the traditional Yorkshire dialect song Lyke Wake Dirge. Sainte-Maries other well-known songs include Mister Cant You See, (a Top 40 U.S. hit in 1972); Hes 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.[20] She also appeared on Pete Seegers Rainbow Quest with Pete Seeger in 1965 and several Canadian Television productions from the 1960s through to the 1990s,[8] and other TV shows such as American Bandstand, Soul Train, The Johnny Cash Show and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson; and sang the opening song The Circle Game (written by Joni Mitchell[8]) in Stuart Hagmanns film The Strawberry Statement (1970). In the late sixties, Sainte-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. 1970s In late 1975, Sainte Marie received a phone call from Dulcy Singer, then Associate Producer of Sesame Street, to appear on the show. According to Sainte-Marie, Singer wanted her to count and recite the alphabet like everyone else, but instead, she wanted to teach the shows young viewers that Indians still exist. Sainte-Marie had been invited earlier that year to appear on another childrens TV show which she would not name, but turned the invitation down since the program ran commercials for G.I. Joe war toys. Sainte-Marie regularly appeared on Sesame Street over a five-year period from 1976 to 1981, along with her first son, Dakota Starblanket Wolfchild, whom she breast-fed in one episode. Sesame Street even aired a week of shows from her home in Hawaii in December 1977; where Sainte-Marie and her family were joined by Bob (Bob McGrath), Maria (Sonia Manzano), Mr. Hooper (Will Lee), Olivia (Alaina Reed Hall, who was Sainte-Maries closest friend from the Sesame Street cast), Big Bird and Oscar (both portrayed by Caroll Spinney). In 1979 the film Spirit of the Wind, featuring Sainte-Maries original musical score including the song Spirit of the Wind, was one of three entries that year at Cannes, along with The China Syndrome and Norma Rae. The film is a docudrama of George Attla, the winningest dog musher of all time, as the film presents him, with all parts played by Native Americans except one by Slim Pickens. The film was shown on cable TV in the early 1980s and was released in France in 2003. Sainte-Maries musical score has been described as inspiring, haunting, and perfection. 1980s Sainte-Marie began using Apple Inc. Apple II[22] and Macintosh computers as early as 1981 to record her music and later some of her visual art.[6] The song Up Where We Belong (which Sainte-Marie co-wrote with Will Jennings and musician 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 later covered by Cliff Richard and Anne Murray on Cliffs album of duets, Twos Company.[citation needed] In the early 1980s one of her native songs was used as the theme song for the CBCs native series Spirit Bay. She was cast for the TNT 1993 telefilm The Broken Chain. It was shot entirely in Virginia. In 1989 she wrote and performed the music for Where the Spirit Lives, a film about native children being abducted and forced into residential schools. 1990s Buffy Sainte-Marie playing the Peterborough Summer Festival of Lights on June 24, 2009. Sainte-Marie voiced the Cheyenne character, Kate Bighead, in the 1991 made-for-TV movie Son of the Morning Star, telling the Indian side of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Lt. Col. George Custer was killed.[23] In 1992, after a sixteen-year recording hiatus, Sainte-Marie released the album Coincidence and Likely Stories.[24] Recorded in 1990 at home in Hawaii on her computer and transmitted via modem through the early Internet to producer Chris Birkett in London, England,[8] 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 film The Broken Chain with Pierce Brosnan along with fellow First Nations Baháí 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 a re-release of Universal Soldier. 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, New Mexico. In 1969 she started a philanthropic non-profit fund Nihewan Foundation for American Indian Education devoted to improving Native American students participation in learning.[25] She founded the Cradleboard Teaching Project in October 1996 using funds from her Nihewan Foundation and with a two-year grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan. With projects across Mohawk, Cree, Ojibwe, Menominee, Coeur DAlene, Navajo, Quinault, Hawaiian, and Apache communities in eleven states, partnered with a non-native 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.[26] 2000s Sainte-Marie performing at The Iron Horse in Northampton, Massachusetts, on June 15, 2013 In 2000, Sainte-Marie gave the commencement address at Haskell Indian Nations University.[27] In 2002 she sang at the Kennedy Space Center for Commander John Herrington, USN, a Chickasaw and the first Native American astronaut.[28] In 2003 she became a spokesperson for the UNESCO Associated Schools Project Network in Canada.[29] In 2002, a track written and performed by Sainte-Marie, entitled Lazarus, was sampled by Hip Hop producer Kanye West and performed by CamRon and Jim Jones of The Diplomats. The track is called Dead or Alive. In June 2007, she made a rare U.S. appearance at the Clearwater Festival in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. In 2008, a two-CD set titled Buffy/Changing Woman/Sweet America: The Mid-1970s Recordings was released, compiling the three studio albums that she recorded for ABC Records and MCA Records between 1974 and 1976 (after departing her long-time label Vanguard Records). This was the first re-release of this material. In September 2008, Sainte-Marie made a comeback onto the music scene in Canada with the release of her latest studio album Running For The Drum. It was produced by Chris Birkett (producer of her 1992 and 1996 best of albums). Sessions for this latest project commenced in 2006 in Sainte-Maries home studio in Hawaii and in part in France. They continued until spring 2007.[citation needed] Censorship Sainte-Marie claimed in a 2008 interview at the National Museum of the American Indian[30] that she had been blacklisted and that she, along with Native Americans and other native people in the Red Power movements, were put out of business in the 1970s.[31] 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 at Diné College given to Brenda Norrel, a staff writer with Indian Country Today ... In the 1970s, not only was the protest movement put out of business, but the Native American movement was attacked.[32] According to Norrel, this article was initially censored by Indian Country Today, and finally published only in part in 2006.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 14:49:01 +0000
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