Sainte-Marie, Buffy

Sainte-Marie, Buffy , Native American singer, songwriter, artist, activist and mom; b. Piapot Reserve, Saskatchewan, Canada, Feb. 20, 1941. Born on a Cree Reservation in Canada, Sainte-Marie was adopted by a white couple in New England after her mother died in an accident in Edmonton. She was not even aware of her Native-American heritage until her mid-teens. Her memories of her adoptive family seem less than pleasant.

While in college during the early 1960s, Sainte-Marie started to make a name for herself on the folkie coffee-house circuit with her dark good looks and distinctive, dusky, vibrato-laden alto. Although her voice made her a difficult sell for radio, she showed remarkable ability as a songwriter. During this period, she wrote genuinely touching love songs like “Until It’s Time for You to Go” (a Top 40 hit for Elvis) and (later) the Grammy and Oscar winning “Up Where We Belong,” and powerful protest songs like “Universal Soldier” (covered by Donovan). Her songs have been performed by artists ranging from Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand, and Janis Joplin to noted songwriters in their own right like Tracy Chapman. She described her goal as a songwriter as trying “to write the kind of songs that would make as much sense in ancient Rome as they would today.”

Signed to Vanguard records (along with many other fellow folkies) in the mid-1960s, Sainte-Marie never experienced a great deal of record company support, but they also let her experiment. She recorded songs with orchestrations by Peter (PDQ Bach) Shickele, covered tunes by dark horses like Leonard Cohen and explored genres from country to flat-out rock. Her future husband Jack Nitzsche produced the She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina album, which featured Ry Cooder and Crazy Horse. Her one Top 40 hit as an artist, “Mister Can’t You See” (#38, 1972) came from the Moon Shot album which featured soul stalwarts, the Memphis Horns.

In 1976 Sainte-Marie retired from active touring and recording to be a mother, although she and her son Dakota Wolfchild Starblanket appeared for five years as regulars on Sesame Street, exposing the young viewers to Native American culture. She became very active within the American Indian Movement. During that time, she earned a Ph.D. in fine art, experimenting with digital images on her computer. She also has degrees in education and Oriental philosophy. She wrote a children’s book, Nokosis and the Magic Hat, in the mid-1980s. In her home studio, she also began working on creating music digitally, creating the score for a Canadian documentary about strippers.

In 1993, with her high school senior son in the band, Sainte-Marie released and toured to support her first album in a decade and a half, Coincidence and Likely Stories. Her 1996 album Up Where We Belong found her playing favorite songs, both her own and others, on her new equipment. She claims to sing better in her 50s than when she started, noting in The London Times, “When I was just out of college, I couldn’t sing my way out of a hat.” She also has created the Cradleboard Teaching Project, a multimedia curriculum used throughout the country to teach students in grades 3–12 about the indigenous people of the Americas.

Discography

It’s My Way! (1964); Many a Mile (1965); Little Wheel Spin & Spin (1966); Fire & Fleet & Candlelight (1967); I’m Gonna Be a Country Girl Again (1968); Illuminations (1970); She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina (1971); Moon Shot (1972); Quiet Places (1973); Native North American Chilli: An Odyssey (1974); Buffy (1974); Changing Woman (1975); Sweet America (1976); Spotlight on Buffy Sainte-Marie (1981); Coincidence & Likely Stories (1992); Up Where We Belong (1996).

—Hank Bordowitz