Less often seen at summer fetes is a 70-year-old Red Indian (her term) in a heavily studded leather jacket, tearing at ear-splitting volume through five decades of music. Buffy Sainte-Marie’s band of much younger Manitoban musicians revelled in the changes. A headdress was tipped to Elvis in the breakneck rockabilly of “Blue Sunday”, all “Since My Baby Left Me” and “Saturday Night Ain’t Nothing to Me”. And Broadway collided head-on with country and western on “He’s an Indian Cowboy in the Rodeo”.
Although Sainte-Marie was a smiling presence, the songs burned with anger. Once she dispatched the schmaltzy “Up Where We Belong”, her Oscar-winning song, in a reading pitched halfway between Jennifer Warnes and Joe Cocker, the material darkened into punk aggression. On “No No Keshagesh” she scolded rapacious corporations. “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” was an account of miscarriages of justice and the persecution of the American Indian Movement, the reggae rumble of the verses kicking up into a defiant chorus.
By David Honigmann
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