Buffy Sainte-Marie Is an Indigenous Icon, Singer, and Activist

Buffy Sainte-Marie is an Indigenous icon. The Canadian singer, songwriter, and activist first rose to prominence in the 1960s, when real flesh-and-blood Native people were seldom seen in pop culture, essentially assumed to have gone extinct. Her music was wildly popular and commercially successful, but she forged her own path, unafraid of controversy and sharing harsh truths from her own Indigenous perspective.

Sainte-Marie comes from humble beginnings. A member of the Cree First Nation, she was born on a reserve in the Qu'Appelle Valley of Saskatchewan, Canada — but like many Native children, she was taken from her birth family at a young age. She was adopted by a family in Massachusetts, later attending the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It was there that her musical talent really began to blossom. One of her earliest songs, "Universal Soldier," was an anti-war anthem responding to the Vietnam War. She later took an active role in funding the Native occupation of Alcatraz and had comrades on the ground during the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee by American Indian Movement activists. During the 1970s, she also joined the cast of Sesame Street, once famously breast feeding her son on-air at a time when such behavior was considered provocative and virtually unheard of.

Sainte-Marie went on to become the first Native woman to win an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for co-writing “Up Where We Belong,” a song featured in the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman. Despite her professional successes, her unwillingness to keep quiet came with a price. She was blacklisted by Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and suspects that her career prospects in the U.S. were dampened by government officials wary of her activism. Nevertheless, she kept right on working. In 2018, she was the subject of Andrea Warner’s Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography, with a forward written by Sainte-Marie’s friend Joni Mitchell, and her latest album Medicine Songs is a collection of frontline songs about unity and resistance.

Teen Vogue recently had the privilege of interviewing this living legend over email ahead of her birthday on February 20.

Editor’s note: This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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Teen Vogue: You were one of the first well-known Indigenous women who broke into the mainstream. What were your experiences like as a Native woman in public life during the 1960s and 1970s?

Buffy Sainte-Marie: It was pretty lonely. I didn't have a band, so I traveled all over the world alone. I had graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1962 with a degree in Oriental philosophy and education, never took music lessons. This was after the beatniks and before the hippies, and Pete Seeger and the Weavers were becoming famous singing American folk songs. I went to Greenwich Village to try my luck singing the songs I'd been writing all my life, in coffeehouses. I didn't drink alcohol, had never met a businessman or a lawyer, and I didn't go out to the bars after my show, which was where social and business deals were made. Business-wise, that was considered a mistake, but it's probably why I've had such a long and healthy life. Still touring and winning awards at 80 — yikes! — until COVID sent everybody home.

A lot of my downtime I spent in Saskatchewan with my Cree family (who adopted me in my late teens), but mostly I was on the road. If I had a concert in Norway, I'd be up in Lapland with the Saamis (who are the Indigenous people there). In Australia, I'd do concerts in Sydney and Melbourne, then take off with Aboriginal friends there. So I lived my public life with mainstream audiences, and my private life with Indigenous people internationally, which was really fun and enlightening from both sides. I was friends with Thelma Stiffarm and others from the National Indian Youth Council, who were advancing Native American law issues, but, as I say, it was pretty lonesome for a girl alone on the global road with few connections to show business.

TV: You have an extraordinary, inspiring history of social justice activism and speaking truth to power. Please tell us about some of the causes you were involved in and why they were close to your heart. 

BS-M: Well first, it's been my love songs — “Until It's Time for You to Go” and “Up Where We Belong” — not my activist songs that have made me enough money to be in show business, which is expensive. Traveling alone, I was solo but all over the place, kind of a one-girl cause. There weren't any Native American causes then. I had a lot of education and a big mouth, and audiences had never heard anybody stick up for Indian issues. In 1968 I was invited to play a lead role in an episode of The Virginian, a two-hour movie-for-television series. Against the advice of managers and agents, I insisted on all the Indigenous roles being filled by Indigenous actors and actresses or I wouldn't take the part, and guess what? They said yes! With Jay Silverheels and Lois Red Elk from the Indian Actors Workshop, we filled all the roles, and that was the first time it had ever happened. The headlines said, "Indian Girl Changes Hollywood"!  Pretty good, eh? 

The big photo ops staged by managers of white folk singers never mentioned Indian issues and I wasn't part of their stable, never was invited. The [Oneida-Cree] comedian Charlie Hill used to complain with me that in Indian Country, where we should have had big audiences and could have made change, the big energy companies owned the theaters, the colleges, the newspapers, and radio stations, and we were kept out. I had big hits in New York and L.A., but people in Oklahoma and South Dakota never got to hear us. I didn't learn about the radio blacklisting or FBI surveillance until 20 years later and had no idea what I had been up against, just had thought, Singers come and singers go.

I just continued doing grassroots concerts with the American Indian Movement and other activist groups, spotlighting local Indian issues and providing platforms for others, although the male activists seldom handed over the microphone to a woman. When my son was born, I joined the cast of Sesame Street in 1975 and for five years was a semi-regular, where we did shows about breastfeeding, Indigenous languages, sibling rivalry… It was great! They never tried to stereotype me, included my writing in songs and scripts, and made a huge worldwide impact on things I care about that affect everybody.

TV: What an amazing career you’ve had, spanning across disciplines and hemispheres. Out of all your accomplishments, what are you most proud of?

BS-M: Bringing Indigenous issues to a global audience generation after generation. Although white show business didn't support Indigenous issues, guess who did? Muhammad Ali, [fellow boxer] Ken Norton, [Black civil rights activist] Stokely Carmichael, Stevie Wonder, [singer and songwriter] Richie Havens! And [comedian] Dick Gregory even came with me to my reservation in Saskatchewan to help us raise public awareness of issues there! Flying away, we were both crying on the airplane and Dick said he'd had no idea about that kind of poverty and oppression in Indian Country.

Another thing I've always been proud of is carrying Joni Mitchell's demo tape around in my purse for months all over the world, playing it for anybody who would listen when show business didn't want to let her in. I sent [record executive] Elliot Roberts down to hear Joni sing in Greenwich Village one night. He became her manager and they made a great career together.

And the third thing on my happy list is that I founded a scholarship fund —the Nihewan Foundation — in 1969, and 30 years later I found out that two of my early scholarship recipients went on to found tribal colleges in their own communities. One of them, Lionel Bordeaux, also [helped found] AIHEC, the American Indian Tribal Colleges Consortium.

TV: As an Indigenous icon with so much invaluable life experience, what current global, national, or Native issues are you most concerned about? What would you like to see happen to address these issues?

BS-M: Missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. The enslavement and murder of indigenous people has been going on for 500 years and continues today because nobody stops it. 
I'm also a friend and supporter of Winona LaDuke's Honor the Earth efforts to provide sustainable food solutions and to stop the pipelines, as in Standing Rock. And I'm providing my super-positive activist song "Carry It On" to Bill McKibben's team at 350.org, who are concerned with climate change issues.

TV: The Native mindset is different than the pervading colonial-settler one, in that Natives are taught to think about the next seven generations in all that we do. Given that, what is your vision for the future?

BS-M: I long for a world where people understand each other better. Music and food can help because one of the missing links is fun. I strive for solutions, beyond complaints. I also wish that everybody understood the impact that the Doctrine of Discovery is still having in American and Canadian law, even though it was written in the 15th century, saying that white explorers own the land and everybody on it and that Indigenous inhabitants should be enslaved or killed. I'm not kidding. Look it up.

I don't like the term white supremacy. I do love Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility, but also Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, who sees like me that the problem is not with the "white," it's with the "supremacy" of any group over others. Just so happens that in our country in this time the bullies at the top happen to be that color.

TV: What advice do you have for young Native girls growing up in Canada and the U.S.? 

BS-M: Besides the very serious tropes about avoiding alcohol, drugs, dark alleys, and bad boyfriends, and wear a mask, I gotta add: Keep your nose on the joy trail. Find something you believe in and learn it, practice it, research it, support it with all your heart. Sometimes local trolls can be so discouraging, [but] you're smart to get out of town. Go to college, find some new friends, ripen day by day into who you know you can be, and then you'll be in a better position to shine your light in this big world, even back home.

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