Buffy Sainte-Marie says headdresses are 'painful' as fashion trend

Buffy Sainte-Marie has seen fashion-conscious fans show up to concerts wearing headdresses as a trendy statement -- and she's seen enough.

"When it comes to things like headdresses, there are some things that are actually, factually, personally, deeply cultural to our heritage," Sainte-Marie said in an interview in Toronto this week.

"To some guy who's got models in high heels, bikini bottoms, pasties and a big headdress, and everybody's drunk -- I want people to understand why that is painful or disgusting, why that is negative to us.

"It'd be like if you really loved your grandmother or your mom and all of a sudden you're watching wrestling on TV and you see your mom's picture on some wrestler's crotch.

"It's inappropriate. It's not funny. It doesn't help."

For the past few years, headdresses have become a popular -- and controversial -- fashion accessory. The trend seems to rear its ugly head with particular frequency at summer music festivals.

Recently, festivals have fought back against the misguided trend. Osheaga, WayHome, Boots and Hearts, Heavy Montreal, Ile Soniq and the Edmonton Folk Festival have all issued bans in various forms on the fake indigenous headwear.

Still, Sainte-Marie says the trend endures.

"We see it a lot in Europe, especially in Germany," said Sainte-Marie, who was recently shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize for her fiery album "Power in the Blood."

"You see these people showing up and they have handmade, craftsy, fake headdress-like things, and they somehow think they're paying us a compliment.

"But we let them know."

Still, Sainte-Marie -- the decorated owner of an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, a Gemini and two Juno Awards -- stops short of calling for an outright ban.

She just wants anyone donning a headdress to understand how it will make an aboriginal person feel.

"I don't tell people what to do," she said.

"If you're still going to be a jerk, that's OK, but we want you to know that there are some things that are part of our cultural heritage that mean a lot to us.

"I think it's mostly ignorance," she added. "I think most people who are doing that probably haven't given it much thought."

Buffy Sainte-Marie Interview - Article originally published at ctvnews.ca

Buffy Sainte-Marie interviewed on Australian TV, 1972 (Video)

Born on the Piapot Reserve in Saskatchewan's Qu'Appelle Valley, Buffy Sainte-Marie was a writer of protest and love songs that became classics in the 1960s, and were recorded by such artists as Barbara Streisand, Elvis Presley, Neil Diamond, and Janis Joplin.

Buffy was adopted and raised in Maine and Massachusetts. By the age of 24, Sainte-Marie had toured all over Europe, Canada, Australia and Asia. Billboard magazine named her "Best New Artist" for her debut album. During the Lyndon Johnson administration, Buffy was blacklisted along with Eartha Kitt and Taj Mahal, due to her honest, outspoken protestations.

Buffy has travelled worldwide working hard to preserve the intellectual property of all indigenous peoples. She currently heads the Nihewan Foundation for Native American education and has also created a scholarship fund for Native American study. -SOURCE

In 1976, Sainte-Marie quit recording to raise her son and to continue as a student of experimental music. In 1993 she returned to music and recorded "Coincidence and Likely Stories." That same year, she helped establish a new JUNO Awards category for aboriginal music. 1993 continued to be a banner year for her as she headlined a concert of indigenous artists in Lapland. The program was televised in Germany, Sweden, Norway and Finland. France named her best international artist for 1993, and the United Nations asked her to proclaim the International Year of Indigenous People.

Scenes from a Life: Buffy Sainte-Marie

"There was no one moment where I felt like I belonged. It was a whole bouquet of moments for me," Buffy Sainte-Marie says of her identity.

Several rock biographers have approached Buffy Sainte-Marie to tell her story. She finally decided to share her adventures as a recording and visual artist, activist and actress with Blair Stonechild, a writer from the Muscowpetung First Nation in her home province of Saskatchewan. The Post’s Melissa Leong caught up with Sainte-Marie to talk about saying no to Elvis, and hanging with Big Bird.

Buffy’s own reality, 1943-1953, Boston

When I was about three years old, I was not a happy little girl. I lived in a neighbourhood where there were bullies and pedophiles. What made me happy was crayons, paints and the discovery of the piano. I sat down and within a few days, I could play the piano. I’ve never taken lessons. I found out a few years ago that I’m actually dyslexic in music. Today, I can write for a symphony but I can’t read it back the next day.

I was a natural artist. [But] I was scolded in school because I didn’t make the trees look like broccoli. This discrepancy between realities: my real music and school music, my real painting and school drawing that also carried through to native people. I was told there weren’t any Indians. The class went to the museum and the Indians were dead and stuffed next to the dinosaur. What it has summed up in my life has been: my reality was not what people were telling me reality was. This can either make you schizophrenic or it can make you curious and interested in solving that mystery. Related

Finding a home, 1962, Saskatchewan’s Piapot Reserve

I went to a powwow at the Wikwemikong. They introduced me to Crees from Saskatchewan, including Emile Piapot. It’s a Cree tradition that if the family has lost a child, they keep their hearts open for another child. I had grown up in an adoptive home. They thought I was possibly the daughter that their relatives had lost in the ’40s when children were shipped out of native communities, or that I would be the one who would fill the holes in their hearts. There was no one moment where I felt like I belonged. It was a whole bouquet of moments for me: sitting around the drum with my uncles, spending time with my niweme, the man who gave me my Cree name.

Selling Universal Soldier for $1, early 1960s, Greenwich Village

In 1962, I went to Greenwich Village with my college degree and my guitar. It wasn’t hippie time yet. It was still beatniks and coffee houses were still serving coffee. I sang at Gerde’s Folk City and Bob Dylan was singing there that night. He sent me down to the Gaslight Café. One night, I was singing Universal Soldier — Universal Soldier is about individual responsibility for the world we live in, including whether we allow our elected officials to make a war — and The Highwaymen came in. They said they wanted to record Universal Soldier and asked who is the publisher? I said, “What’s that?”

A guy named Elmer Gordon said he could help because he had a publishing company. He wrote up a contract on a napkin, gave me a dollar and assumed the rights for Universal Soldier. That’s how green I was. Universal Soldier became a huge hit for Donovan in Europe and Glen Campbell in the U.S. Ten years later, I bought the publishing back for $25,000. I never did that again. When Elvis Presley recorded Until It’s Time For You to Go, his businessmen asked for the publishing and I said no. I learned the hard way but it was a good lesson.

How to get to Sesame Street, 1976

Sesame Street originally contacted me to say the alphabet. I said, “Have you ever done any aboriginal programming?” I worked with them for the next five and a half years, brought them to different reservations. They never tried to stereotype me. I taught the Count how to count in Cree. Just a year into Sesame Street I found out I was pregnant. I was doing three shows a day with a baby on my hip, I asked them, “What about doing a segment on breastfeeding?” Big Bird is sitting in his nest and I’m breast-feeding Koty. Big Bird said, “That’s a funny way to feed a baby.” I said, “It’s not the only way but he gets everything he needs and I get to cuddle him.” We were being seen by 72 countries three times a day. What an opportunity to make the world better.

Buffy gets a Mac, 1984, Hawaii

All of a sudden, my life changed. I had a machine on which I could record my music, my writing and my paintings. This was the holy grail for me. People didn’t get it at first, they associated the computer with doing their taxes and making pie charts. But the Macintosh was made by two hippies in a garage for the rest of us. As an artist, it was just wonderful for me. I had always been a painter. Now I could work in my wet studio, I could photograph or scan my paintings, turn them upside down, print them up, paint on them some more, scan it in again. In the early 90s, I got my first digital art show.

Buffy Sainte-Marie: It’s My Way by Blair Stonechild is available Oct. 30 from Fifth House Publishers ($24.95).

Buffy Sainte-Marie – review

Buffy Sainte-Marie – review- Via Guardian News and Media

Buffy Sainte-Marie co-wrote Up Where We Belong, the Joe Cocker/Jennifer Warnes duet from the end of An Officer and a Gentleman, when Richard Gere appears in that blinding naval suit. She also wrote the protest song Universal Soldier, and once pulled out of a kids' TV show when she found they advertised GI Joe toys. How the legendary Cree singer reconciled her military movie smash with a lifetime of pacifism God only knows, but as she – now 71, wiry, effervescent – reminds us tonight, she had to make a living somehow, because US radio wouldn't play her records.

It's easy to see why America freaked at lyrics such as "Indian reservations are the nuclear frontline/ Uranium poisoning kills" (from The Priests of the Golden Bull). Those songs fill half of tonight's show, with words of startling clarity often set to an innocuous glam-rock backing.

Sainte-Marie reflects the strong, profoundly feminine philosophies of Antony Hegarty's Meltdown, of which this gig is part – he has compared her voice to a hex. At the same time, Sainte-Marie is a great stylist – a writer of pastiche. Piney Wood Hills was a country hit for Bobby Bare, Blue Sunday is pure rockabilly and the crooner Until It's Time for You to Go was a perfect fit for Elvis in 1972. When she first came to England she was billed as a folk singer. "I wasn't," she says tonight – "I was a songwriter, but I didn't tell anyone."

There's a fascinating clash between the pure messenger she might have been, and the career that talent allowed and politics dictated. Amid the pow-wow rock and Native American vocables, there's a cover of folk revivalist Cliff Eberhart's Goodnight, its elaborate phrases unfolding like an early Jimmy Webb song. Buffy says she wishes she'd written it. It almost sounds like she did.
Source

Buffy Sainte-Marie. Photograph: Andy Sheppard/Redferns

Buffy Sainte-Marie Interview Video- The Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission collected 1000s of statements from Indian Residential School survivors. The national journey wrapped-up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan with a concert headlining Buffy Sainte-Marie. Lisa Risom spoke with the internationally renowned artist about healing through music and art.

Residential Schools

Residential schools for Aboriginal people in Canada date back to the 1870s. Over 130 residential schools were located across the country, and the last school closed in 1996. These government-funded, church-run schools were set up to eliminate parental involvement in the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual development of Aboriginal children.

During this era, more than 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were placed in these schools often against their parents' wishes. Many were forbidden to speak their language and practice their own culture. While there is an estimated 80,000 former students living today, the ongoing impact of residential schools has been felt throughout generations and has contributed to social problems that continue to exist.

On June 11, 2008, the Prime Minister, on behalf of the Government of Canada, delivered a formal apology in the House of Commons to former students, their families, and communities for Canada's role in the operation of the residential schools. (Source)

Interview Rockwired: Sign It And Pray It And Live It

Interview Rockwired with Buffy Sainte-Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie tals to Rockwired about her latest Cd "Running For The Drum" being blacklisted by Johnson and Nixon and the boundless creativity that comes naturally.

ROCKWIRED had the privilege of speaking with BUFFY SAINTE-MARIE over the phone. Here is how it went.

What kept you away from recording and what was it that brought you back?

I never left. I’m always recording. I’ve got a recording studio in my house. And the last three albums I made, which started in the late eighties, were all recorded at home, so I’m recording all of the time. I never break from recording. Every now and then I will go ‘Okay, I feel like going on the road!’ My life is in a good place where I feel like I can go on the road and I’ll put things together on an album. I co-produce with the same person all of the time and I’ve put out my last three albums like that. The reason that I wasn’t recording during the last administration is probably perfectly clear. There is no sense in putting your baby out in the rain. I knew that the timing wasn’t right. I had also been working on the CRADLEBOARD PROJECT for along time and I wanted to get that to a place where our dream would come true – where we could make it free online to everyone instead of having to run a business. I got it to that point a couple of years ago and at that time, someone wanted to make a bio documentary about me and I always turned those down because I think they’re always so freaking boring with a bunch of talking heads and the camera panning slowly from left to right over a black and white photo. No thank you! Everybody else wanted to do stories of who I was back in the sixties but the film crew from Canada knew that I was more than that and I think they did a good job of capturing all of the things that I like to do. That was happening and I had all of these songs that I really liked and I was campaigning for BARACK OBAMA in Albuquerque and the timing was right. It was personal timing as well as market timing. I’ve never been the kind of recording artist that does things just because the record company needs money right now. This album is on my own label.

There aren’t any record companies anymore anyway.

I know.

How is ‘RUNNING FOR THE DRUM’ different from previous releases?

It’s funny. I wish you would say what makes it cohesive with all of my other albums. From my very first album, I’ve always been very diverse in terms of style. I came up in a very lucky time during the sixties when the playlists were very wide. If you turned on a radio station, people would be playing folk music next to flamenco, next to blues next to pop music. People could hear all different kinds of music at the same time. Throughout the seventies and eighties and nineties, the playlists got really tight. A country station was a country station. Now we have a time that is very similar to the sixties with the internet. I’m still creating songs that are the best love songs that ever happened to me and my perfect points of view when it comes to the way I see the world in songs with social meaning like ‘NO NO KESHAGESH’ and ‘WORKING FOR THE GOVERNMENT’. They are the best that I can do about that subject. There are always the songs that are just for fun like ‘I BET MY HEART ON YOU’ or some of the dance tunes that are on the album. Since the late eighties, I’ve been recording at home in my own studio with lots of computers. I’ve recorded on computers since the 1960’s. I had the first ever totally electronic vocal album that was ever made and I made the first album in the nineties to be distributed by the internet. I’ve been comfortable with computers for a really long time and with recording at home. The one thing that is a bit new to people who follow my music but not knew to people who know me is that some of the songs that sound like remixes were done a long time ago but I felt that the market place wasn’t buying that at the time so I held them back. And I certainly held them back during the BUSH and REAGAN years because of their content. They had a real different kind of thing that you could only do with computers and it wasn’t until quite recently that people have been ready and willing to accept some of the crazy things that we can do with computers.

I remember reading about your embrace of technology back in the early nineties and the digital art that you were making. Describe what it was like to play around with that technology in its infancy.
It was really fun because I’m an artist and a musician. I’m not doing taxes and I’m not trying to get someone to vote for me or to launch a rocket or make a war. For me, computers have always been about art. If you go into some artist’s studio you see the damnedest things in there. You see hammer and nails and paintbrushes and stuff that they paste onto other stuff. For me, a computer was just another tool and ingredient in what I had always done all my life which is making sound, music and pictures and make up stories. To me, this is no big mystery. This is what every little kid does at the beach. You take fifteen four year olds to the beach and they are all artists. They all make sand castles, they make pictures and plays and stories. They use their imagination. I’m just one of the lucky ones who always held onto that and I think it’s really, really natural. I have no schooling in music. As a matter of fact, two years ago, I found out that I am dyslexic in music. That was why I could never learn to read it. I know how but it’s so frustrating to me to try to read. I lose my place by the third bar. It’s like trying to write with my left hand. I can write for an orchestra but I can’t read it back.

Given your embrace of technology, what is your stance on the argument that the internet has ruined the music industry?

(Laughs)

Good answer!

The music business has been pumping and pimping artists for money for as long as we can remember. It’s true that those old dinosaurs have gone out of business like some banks have gone out of business. They’ve gone out of business because their cheating ways finally tracked them down and caught up with them. There are a lot of changes that need to be made in the market place and the record business was one of them. It was unfair, inefficient, wasteful, bone-headed and old-fashioned. It wouldn’t listen to opinions and suggestions from outside including artists whose records were being created and shelved and misrepresented. Although the business did give us some great music, the internet is far more efficient way to go about doing things. I like the wide playlist and I like to go online and discover new things as well as finding albums that came out in the forties that I’ve always been curious about. To me, this is a huge palette of millions of colors – just like digital art is – so I’m a happy girl.

Going back to the documentary that is coupled with the CD – Who did you work with in putting it together?
There is this company called CINEFOCUS which is run by the director JOAN PROWSE and her husband JOHN BESSART. They approached me like many other documentary companies had before. I said yes to them because I felt like they “got” me. They were Canadian and not American so they knew me very well. The American – and some of the Canadian companies – that had approached me in the past wanted to do a kind of ‘where are they now?’ piece on the “Little Indian Girl from the Sixties” and I had no interest in that. Not even when I was the “Little Indian Girl from the Sixties”. The CINEFOCUS people had seen some of my paintings in museums and were highly aware of my CRADLEBOARD TEACHING PROJECT and they were really familiar with all of the songs. I thought that they would do a much creative and accurate and fun presentation than any of the other people that wanted to do a documentary on me. I’m happy with the way it turned out.

From the early days of the folk movement up until now, what has been the biggest surprise for you? What didn’t you expect?

You mean in terms of me?

Yeah.

Oh God! I had no idea that I had ever been blacklisted. That was such a huge surprise. I found out that the JOHNSON Administration had blacklisted years after the fact. I was totally surprised. I got to see my FBI file and I was just flabbergasted. Two years ago, I found out about the CIA and the NIXON Administration too. Those have been the two most surprising things in my whole life. I had no idea that anyone thought that I was that important. I had never broken the law. I’ve always had a very clean record. I never smoked dope on the WHITE HOUSE lawn or nothing like that.

Did you ever find out why?

No. they don’t tell you. You see your FBI file and anything pertinent is crossed out. They were following me because they thought that I might be a trouble maker. They continued to follow me after they never turned anything up so it was a total waste of money on their part.

They followed JOHN LENNON around too and what did he ever do?

They followed lots of artists. When I found out about in the eighties, what was I going to do? Call a press conference? Who gave a shit? No one knew who I was anymore. Mission accomplished, I guess. They do it very well and they don’t tell you that they’re going to do it and there is not necessarily a good reason for them to do it. They can destroy a career. TAJ MAHAL was good friends with EARTHA KITT and the three of us were in the same boat. We all found out about it in the eighties. EARTHA felt that LYNDON JOHNSON was just an egotistical man and that people of color were being targeted in his Administration because we were already doing something that he wanted to take claim for which was ‘The Great Society’. We were already doing it. That was what she felt about it but I don’t know. Who knows? I think it was just a bonehead being a bonehead. I never thought I was important enough to warrant such consideration so I was really surprised when it turned out that I did. The only thing that really pissed me off was that at that time I was really very serious about being effective in making good social change and I was gagged. That was the part that bothered me. Now NIXON – that was easy to put together because it was the NIXON Administration that was a part of the PINE RIDGE RESERVATION being transferred to the government in secret – the part of the land that contained uranium. I was one of the people that ended up being hurt because of that. Many other Native people were hurt worse than I was. Where are they now?


They’re all dead.

And I’m still having fun! I’ve got a great record and a great DVD.

Where do you think the need to express yourself musically comes from?

I don’t think it was a need. I think it was fun. It’s not as thought someone sat me down and ordered me to take piano lessons. I saw a piano when I was three and I never developed a fondness for dolls or for sports – team sports. I just nailed myself to the piano and my crayons and paper and dancing around. I used to lie on the floor with vacuum cleaner pipes to my ear listening to SWAN LAKE. I invented the headphones. You didn’t know that did you?

I believe it!

That was the kind of kid I was. I just loved things that people nowadays call the arts. My family didn’t call it the arts though. They just knew that I was playing the piano and they thought that was nice. There no lessons for me and there was no need.

Of the hundreds of people that have covered you songs over the years, whose interpretation stands out the most for you?

Oh God! JOE COCKER and JENNIFER WARNES! I won an ACADEMY AWARD because of them! I like that! I’m actually looking at the statue right now. They did great. That also had a lot to do with the arranger STUART LEVINE and WILL JENNINGS. You know what? I also like CHET ATKINS’ cover of UNTIL IT’S TIME TO GO. His version is so beautiful. They’re all beautiful. What I like about them is that they are all different. To think of writing a song that is so personal to m that is also personal to other people is just a trip. It’s a privilege to write songs that other people like too. How nice is that?

NO NO KESHAGESH strongly resonates for me as a listener. What inspired it?

The state of the world that we’re living in inspired it. I started writing it during a Republican administration and into a Democratic administration and back again to a Republican one. During this time, I saw people go from greedy, to greedier to greediest. I had been saying since the seventies something JOHN TRUDELL once told me. He said “BUFFY, there are some people in the world who don’t want Indians or anybody else interfering with their complete control of all available lands and natural resources. That has been such a stabilizing statement to me. Whenever I see things going really bad, I put myself back at any time in our history and there has always been an upper one-percent who wants to own and control everything including nature and people. We have survived these boneheads that seem to appear in America every thirty years or so. We’re in another war right now and to me war is just ‘Money Laundering 101’. Back to ‘NO NO KESHAGESH’. KESHAGESH is what we call a puppy that eats his own and everybody else’s. It actually means greedy guts. Back on the reserve, we had a little puppy and we called him KESHAGESH. Sometimes, I’m just kind of open hearted about songs – especially love songs, but other times, I’m quite strategic about writing a song like ‘UNIVERSAL SOLDIER’, ‘BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE’ or ‘NO NO KESHAGESH’. ‘UNIVERSAL SOLDIER’ came out at a time when people really like the sound of a voice and a guitar, but ‘BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE’ was written at a different time and I wanted it to be effective but people were into a lot of male-dominated rock n roll so I put ‘BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE’ in that kind of a format so that you’re too busy dancing to it before you realize what it’s about. Strategically, I’ve found that a song that has a strong message is better served in a simple and more danceable format. ‘NO NO KESHAGESH’ is very serious song with very serious things to say but its’ very danceable. It stays interesting and keeps changing and it sounds like a big rally.

‘CHO CHO FIRE’ is another song. What inspired that one?

That’s got its own story. When my nephew was a teenager, he used to travel around to pow wows with a tape recorder and he’d send me copies of the tapes. Once he sent me a tape of a group of kids and they were singing in their own language. After listening to that tape, I wrote a song around it but we couldn’t figure out who it was that he had taped. He thought it was one thing and I thought it was somebody else. It turned out to be the BLACK LODGE SINGERS when they were kids and they’ve gone on to be one of the most beloved pow wow groups ever. I got in touch with KENNY who is the lead singer for BLACK LODGE and I sent him the tape that I had and he said “Yeah, that’s us!” So I made a deal with him and we went fifty/fifty on it. A lot of people will rip off indigenous music just because they can. I don’t do that. He ended up with half the writing credit on the song even though he never heard it. CHO CHO FIRE is another really danceable tune and it’s dedicated to the jingle dress dancers.

Explain –if it’s explainable – how the creative process works for you in terms of songwriting. How do you go about that?

The same way I go about it with regard to writing curriculum or painting. It just kind of pops into my head and if it’s intriguing enough for me to be intrigued then maybe someone else will like this too. Depending on how long I stay interested is as far as I develop it. I’ve got thousands of songs that I’ve never let other people hear. Usually, it’s all one thing for me whether it’s writing curriculum or a song or a painting. At the heart of it, there is something that needs to be communicated either through visuals or words or through music or interactive multi-media curriculum. If you can say something in three minutes that takes somebody else four hundred pages in a book to make their point, then you’ve done a good job. The song ‘UNIVERSAL SOLDIER’ in three minutes makes a certain point. It’s about individual responsibility for war. I didn’t rite a big, fat book over it. I did it in three minutes. The same can be said about ‘BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE’ – it keeps you rocking all the way through. That is the same thing that I’m trying to do with curriculum writing. The problem with education in my opinion is that kids are bored and teachers are bored and they don’t have to be anymore. We can use all of he new tools to make engaging, accurate curriculums that are also fun to use. Our kids are really sophisticated when it comes to multi-sensory computers. There is no reason why we can’t be using multi-sensory learning in classrooms.

Talk about the CRADLEBOARD PROJECT.

I was a double major in college. I had a degree in Oriental Philosophy and Education. I was already a teacher and I already knew how to write curriculum and I had already been on SESAME STREET and all of that. When my son’s teacher came to me and showed me the materials that she was using, it was the same bologna that they had tried to pass off on me. I knew that changes needed to be made. I put my teacher’s hat on again. So long as I was just writing text and showing pictures, it just wasn’t the live thing that I wanted it to be. I wanted the kids in the classroom the same experience that I had when I went back to Saskatchewan and spent time on the reservation. There was real, live people doing really fun things. The idea of taking kids online in the late eighties was very appealing to me. I connected one of the schools on the Star Blanket Reserve with my son’s school here in Hawaii. It all came alive, once we put the kids in touch with one another using faxes and pen pals and we were taking them online before it was considered possible to go online. The whole thing came alive! I started my foundation in 1968 – the NEWAN FOUNDATION – and I had always been the only donor. It had all been on my own dime so I had continued with the CRADLEBOARD TEACHING PROJECT from the mid to late eighties and in 1996, the KELLOGG FOUNDATION gave us a grant to model the project initially in eighteen states and everywhere form there. We’ve written SCIENCE THROUGH NATIVE AMERICAN EYES as well as GEOGRAPHY and SOCIAL STUDIES THROUGH NATIVE AMERICAN EYES. These are all real school curriculums. This isn’t like those stupid curriculums that are still in schools today. They’re so shallow that they wind up being about nobody. Nobody can identify with them. We were writing real school curriculums. People are surprised that every culture that has survived has science. Science is simply a matter of observing and experimenting and finding out what works and passing that knowledge on to other people. It’s a whole paradigm shift with regard to interactive multimedia as a means of delivering education and also cross-cultural education. I can’t tell how much trouble education departments are with those old fashioned curriculums that don’t seem to be very engaging to students or teachers.


How far do you think contemporary Native Music has come and where do you think it could go?

When I first started doing Pow Wow Rock and gave it a name in the seventies, I envisioned it as being in the same boat as blues music was in the thirties. It was incredible. It had a lot potential but nobody knew about it. People were pretty surprised when they heard Pow Wow Rock for the first time or when they heard about it for the first time. They didn’t really know what to expect but the Native American community got it immediately. Since that time, we founded the Aboriginal Music category for the JUNO AWARDS in the eighties. Finally the GRAMMY’s caught on and they followed suit in the late nineties. During that time, because of my records and touring and a lot of the work that I had done with local musician groups and aboriginal records companies, people form all different genres who also happened to be of First Nations backgrounds have just plain gotten the idea in their heads that they can be who they are. It’s a new way of thinking for Indian people. It’s a new way of thinking for a lot of people. A lot of people think that there are only a few options available to them because that is all that is being advertised on TV that week. Non-Indian journalists used to ask me “What are you? A folk singer or are you a traditional Indian singer?” or “Oh my God! Are you a pop singer?” As if those things mattered and they don’t. We are who we are. I learned a phrase from a long time ago that goes “…reality is your friend” That’s what keeps me from going nuts during it all. I’ve won a whole lot of awards for ‘RUNNING FOR THE DRUM’ so I’ve been going to a lot of award shows as well as Aboriginal awards shows. In Canada we have three major, ACADEMY AWARD – level Aboriginal music award shows that are televised. That’s a lot of Indian people making all different kinds of music. We’ve come up with all different kinds of music that define our existence and our reality. It wasn’t like the record business invented a whole lot of genres so they would know where to stick their records so that consumers could find them in a store. The new way of thinking is that you make your business fit reality instead of trying to make reality fit into the business. You get to have a GRAMMY category or a JUNO category just because they feel that the Indians got left out. If you have the numbers you can suggest that they have a category for you and we have the numbers on both sides of the border.

What would you like a person to come away with after they’ve listened to RUNNING FOR THE DRUM?

I want them to come away with the desire to hear it again. I hope that they find something that they absolutely love and that they find new things that are a little surprising. The quote FOREST GUMP, ‘Life is a box of chocolates’. They all taste good to me. I’ve made each song its own little movie. I hope people will come away with a sense that they can do many things. All of the things that they could’ve done when they were younger can still be done now. There is still an artist in there and there is still a musician in there. For me it’s all about play – the music and the paintings. The DALAI LAMA says the purpose of life is happiness and if you can look around and find happiness in this crazy world that e live in then I think you’re on the right trail. For me it’s always been about keeping your nose on the joy trail. You’ve got to find the things in life that bring you closer to joy because there are tears in t he world. We need t keep a good handle on what keeps us going and pass those skills on. For me I pass them on through playing music. (SOURCE)

Interview with Jon Roe about life on the road (The Calgary Herald)

Article Originally Published at The Calgary Herald

Life for a travelling band doesn't have to be all about eating fast food while getting crammed in the back of a van with all your equipment. For 71-year-old singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, it's a steady diet of good food and plenty of gym time. The legendary writer of "Up Where We Belong" and "Universal Soldier" chatted with Jon Roe about life on the road, the Internet and recently hitting the studio with Randy Bachman. Visit swervecalgary. com for the full interview.

Are you working on a new album with Randy Bachman? We don't even know what it is. We just really like each other's music, and Randy and I both have a lot of songs that we love that have been overshadowed by our hits. There are a lot of songs that are-oh god, they're all different. Big rockers, some are like bossa nova. All kinds of stuff. We're doing it for ourselves, we don't know if anybody else is going to like it. But we're going to see what we're going to get. We recorded eight songs and we're very happy with them. We don't know what to do next.

You have this history being part of the '60s and the folk music of that time. What do you think is the lasting legacy of that period? It's kind of funny. It's not a lasting legacy so much as a reinvention of the most wonderful things of the '60s. I would say independent thinking. The Internet right now is very much like the streets were in the '60s when students ruled and people were standing up to unfairness in politics and business and corporations.

Do you find it easier to make a living as an artist now that a lot of distribution channels are through the Internet, or is it harder? I'll tell you what's really killing us is baggage charges for touring bands and for sports teams. Sports teams and the arts, we're right on the edge of not being able to continue. Sports teams and high-school bands and professional touring bands-it just costs me a freaking fortune everytime I get on a plane with my equipment and my band's equipment. In Australia, I think it was Virgin Airlines who were the first ones to address this and start giving touring bands a break on their stuff. Recently in the U.S., somebody came up with at least the idea of homogenizing and standardizing what the airlines can charge. Right now they can charge anything they want.

Have you lost the appetite for touring at all? I usually have a good time where I go. The hard part is the day before you fly and having to pack. You know you're going to forget something and you're wondering what the heck it is. The flying itself is long. But I work out all the time and I dance and I move and I eat like a champion. I have sashimi every morning for breakfast. I feed my brain first and I work out so my body's real healthy. I think I'm in better shape than I was in my 20s. All the band works out in a gym, and we eat real good. I don't think it's harder.

Buffy Sainte-Marie: Saturday, March 10. At Grace Presbyterian Church, 1009 15th Ave. S.W. Doors 7p.m. $35 -$40. 403-233-0904, calgaryfolkfest.com.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald

Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com

Interview - National Museum of the American Indian

The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian is located in Washington, D.C. The Museum also operates the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City, and the National Museum of the American Indian Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md.

The National Museum of the American Indian is committed to advancing knowledge and understanding of the Native cultures of the Western Hemisphere, past, present and future, through partnership with Native people and others. The museum works to support the continuance of culture, traditional values, and transitions in contemporary Native life.

The NMAI E-Newservice is a free service to news media serving Native America from the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. The NMAI E-Newservice provides articles, photographs and editorial for news outlets to use free of charge. Please credit the NMAI E-Newservice, or use bylines as provided. Kara Briggs, a Yakama and Snohomish journalist, is the editor. She owns Red Hummingbird Media Corp., which contracts with the National Museum of the American Indian to provide this service.

(Washington D.C. ) Buffy Sainte-Marie is musician and songwriter. She spoke and performed in the Rasmuson Theater at NMAI in March, 2008.(Photographer Katherine Fogden of the NMAI E-Newservice)

A Conversation With Buffy Sainte-Marie -Interview

Interview by Mike Ragogna Orignally published huffingtonpost

"A little over a year ago, I interviewed Buffy Sainte-Marie for the second time with the intention of posting it immediately. For whatever reason, this one got lost and after coming across it recently, I read the transcript for the first time and felt pretty bad that this one somehow flew under the radar. Considering its content and the amount of education Buffy dispensed during our conversation, even though it's ridiculously late in posting, I'd still like to share her thoughts with everyone. Apologies to Buffy. Finally, here is the interview..."

A Conversation with Buffy Sainte-Marie

Mike Ragogna: Hello, Buffy.

Buffy Sainte-Marie: Hi, Mike.

MR: Thank you so much for your time.

BSM: Oh, my pleasure.

MR: The last time we spoke, we talked about your Running For The Drum album.

BSM: It was just coming out then.

MR: It was just coming out, and there was a DVD component that I actually had never seen at the time. Could you talk about how that DVD married with the album?

BSM: I had completed the album and we had completed the DVD, and I had been asked in the past by lots of the usual suspects to do a film or TV biography, but I was never turned on by it because it always seemed to be just from the point of view of the past according to what people knew about me in the West. Of course, I was kind of taken out of the game in the US, but continued on in Asia and Europe and Canada to have a real active career, which I have still today. So, when a Canadian company who really understood a lot more about me than just "Buffy from the sixties" showed an interest in giving people a portrait of myself, not just a as songwriter but also as an educator and a digital artist and a person who's still in love with the world and traveling and interested in both learning and teaching, I said "yes," and so the bio-documentary is called Buffy Sainte Marie: A Multi Media Life, and it was done in Canada by CineFocus.

MR: Did you find yourself looking at some of that information and going, "Wow, what a trip this has been."

BSM: It really has been, but I'm a lucky person, as I said then. I've been traveling since the sixties--lots and lots of airplanes, lots of countries--so what that does for me is it gives me a lot of reflection time. As a writer, traveling often alone, I appreciate both the outside world and my own head for the reinterpreting of the outside world into the little movies that become my songs and also the non-fiction part that turns into multi-media curriculum. So, it was really nice to able to work with a team who were appreciated of that. It wasn't a great surprise, suddenly you turn around and you look back on your life and you see it all laid out, because as a traveling person, I think I'm just kind of a note-taker. But it was wonderful to be able to put it all together in a documentary that really reflected my personal life in Canada and in Hawaii and all the professional things too.

MR: Now, I guess before we go all retro and ask you some questions about the past, I would love to know what you've been up to since the release of the CD/DVD because you're a very busy woman.

BSM: I travel with three other musicians and a road manager. Our whole band--we're all Canadian, Aboriginal Canadian, and the guys in my band are Ojibwe, and Lakota, and Soto, but they're all from reservations around Manitoba, Canada--so, traveling with this kind of band, guys in their late thirties who have experienced the stuff that my songs are about is really, really nourishing for me. It makes the show that much richer. They're all rockers, but of course, my show covers lots of different styles of music. But to be traveling with other aboriginal performers from a generation behind me, it is really an eye-opener, I think, for the audience. It gives the show a lot of both perspective and energy and it's real contemporary. The live show we did all over Europe...oh gosh, we did lots and lots of concerts in England, lots in Germany. We were in France, Belgium, Holland, Scotland, and just traveling around in Europe with a young aboriginal band was just... I'm glad you mentioned the future because as a songwriter, I'm not looking behind very much since I get to include all my favorite songs in the concert, but I'm always writing new things, and to have them tied in via concerts with the stuff I've always done, it just makes a very rich package for me to continually experience. The life of the artist is such an incredible privilege, and it's just so rich and dense with content and information that keeps happening.

MR: Speaking of your being a songwriter, you had such big hits with "Universal Soldier," "Until It's Time For You To Go," and "Up Where We Belong," that you co-wrote that with Will Jennings and Jack Nitzsche in the eighties. That's a huge credit, what's the story behind the song?

BSM: I had already written that melody, and I had never presented it to anybody, but Jack Nitzsche was looking for a main theme for An Officer And A Gentleman and he hadn't come up with something, so I played him the melody "da da da da da da," and he loved it and presented it to Taylor Hackford who was the director and it became not only the main theme but, of course, a huge hit for Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes.

MR: And it won the Oscar.

BSM: Uh-huh, it did for "Best Song." We also won the Golden Globe for that, and a British Academy Award. Boy that song went everywhere. Other times you write a song that hardly anyone hears and it's still your favorite, you know? A lot of puppies in the litter.

MR: (laughs) Buffy are you constantly working on songs? Also, I've never asked you this question before, what's your creative process, like how do these songs come to you as a writer?

BSM: They're really kind of like dreams. Anybody would have a dream. You know you have something new appear in your head and you say, "Oh wow, that's interesting," and you know, if I like it, I'll remember it. If I don't care that much about it, I'll forget it. And so many songs just kind of show up almost finished, like "Until It's Time For You To Go," which was a big hit for a lot of people. I wrote that right away, I just had to write it down. But other things, like "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" or "No No Keshagesh," it takes a lot of crafting, because what you're trying to do in that case is almost like be a journalist. You're trying to stick to accurate facts but make them exciting enough so that you engage an audience that probably doesn't even want to know about that issue. So, there are different kinds of writing, and the more technical kinds of writing...it's almost like being a college girl writing a thesis and I think that that kind of song really profited by my four years at the University of Massachusetts.

But other songs just happen very naturally, the same way they did when I was a little kid. I'm a totally natural writer. I've never been able to learn how to read music. As a matter of fact, I found out a couple years ago that I'm actually dyslexic in music and I had never heard of such a thing, but it does explain why I can write for an orchestra but then I can't read it back the next day. It's like trying to write with my left hand. It can be done but it doesn't make any sense for me, so I'm totally by ear and I record into anything--a tape recorder, a computer--rather than write things down that I can't read back.

MR: The last time we did an interview, we talked about your wonderful song "No No Keshagesh," but let's discuss your version of "America the Beautiful," which you didn't write, but you explored further.

BSM: Again I expanded on it, as many other songwriters have done. I mean, the melody is so beautiful and the sentiment is so beautiful; lots and lots of people have contributed additional verses. But what I did, I wrote like an introduction and a middle section to it that's truly Native American in feel. I did lobbying on the song; I think a lot of people would like to see that be the National Anthem, but so far, it's not. But in contributing new verses and combing through the various contributions which have been made over the years by other writers, it turns out to have a real Native American feel to it, just the gentleness of it, and the reverence for, not America as nation-state "USA!" but more as "mother country," you know, just the idea of loving America.

MR: You've been representing Native American issues for the longest time. Your love of America and Canada and all things Native America is just amazing. And you have really spent your life fighting for a lot of causes. Are there a couple you've been...

BSM: ...if I can interrupt, Mike? It's not as though I've been fighting for causes. What I've really been trying to do is spotlight things that I think people want to know about. I never really understood the concept of "fighting for peace." I don't do that. I keep it a lot more positive. So, I think that what I'm trying to say is I'm spotlighting the work of local areas and communities that's ongoing all the time, so sometimes, I think I get a little too much credit for that. But I am a fan of the realities of bringing to public awareness the incredible work that's being done in the grassroots Native American community and how much need there is to continue that development on the local level.

MR: Buffy, can you spotlight what's been happening lately that we should be aware of?

BSM: Oh gosh, I would like your listeners and readers to understand some of the organizations that Native American people have been working under for a long time like NARF and Native American Rights Fund, which essentially is dedicated to tribal existence. Every now and then, you'll have somebody come and say, "Well, Indian tribes ought to just be disbanded. They're old-fashioned and blah blah blah," which is totally unknowledgeable, right? Tribal existence and Native rights and natural resources and Native American human rights is sometimes ignored at the local level, and this is all over the country. We're also trying to educate the public all the time through every way. I mean, I do it through songs and writing curriculum. Somebody else does it through some kind of local organization, somebody else is involved nationally and also in the development of Indian law, bringing lawyers to understand what treaty rights are about and what Indian law is about, and how treaty rights are the first law of the land. And in dealing with Native American tribes, the US needs to be cognoscente that this is the same as making a treaty with Russia over bombs. The treaties are in existence and aren't going anywhere. They are the first law of the land. NCAI--which is the National Congress of American Indians--they've been working very hard on tribal law enforcement, because in many cases, tribal policemen, people who are working in the area of tribal law, they don't have the right to see the same information as a non-Indian tribal police would have. You know, it's really old-fashioned and unnecessary, so NCAI is at the moment focusing on that. I'm on the board of another organization which is called "Native Arts and Culture Foundation," and this is a ten-million dollar foundation helped by grants from The Ford Foundation and others, focusing on support to Indian art, Indian culture, Indian artists, craftspeople, sculptors, painters, dancers, and musicians, because there are so many artists in Native America who really don't have any kind of entry either into the business world--like show business, the gallery business, or to the art world, colleges and all--so there's a lot of work to be done there. And it's being done, but you know, there are also a lot of people who deserve the credit for spotlighting the issues and making things better, and the work is ongoing, although it doesn't seem to be a visible priority in the US.

MR: Buffy, who are some of the people out there spotlighting causes like yourself?

BSM: Oh gosh, I can't tell you in the US. I would have to give you a Canadian answer. I don't know whether you could use that. In general, it's not like you would have seen in the seventies when the American Indian Movement was so visible, when you could point to people like John Trudell and other people in the American Indian Movement. Dennis Banks and Russell Means were big names then. It's not so much like that now. I think the real brains of Native America are working within foundations, people like Dr. Valorie Johnson, who's a program officer, working in the area of very young children. She works with the Kellogg Foundation, and was really, really important in establishing grants with the Kellogg Foundation having to do with the American Indian Higher Education Consortium and the American Indian College Fund, which support all the tribal colleges within the confines of the US and a couple in Canada. Winona LaDuke, with Seventh Harvest in the Great Lakes area, continues to amaze me. She's a lawyer, Ojibwe background, and continues to really encompass a lot of different areas having to do with foods, sustainability, Native rights, and education. So, she works on a local level, but she does it in a global way too. The internet has changed things so much and has brought so many people together in networking and given others the ability to have a repository for the ongoing work they do, which continues to develop.

So, there are a lot of people. John Trudell is still out doing concerts, teaches. He's an incredible Lakota orator and poet, and a lot of people recognize his name from the American Indian Movement days. He's continued on despite the fact that his family was burned alive in their home during the FBI and other government agency conflicts with the American Indian Movement in which so many people died. But I think most American people aren't aware either of our history or of our ongoing works the way they are in Canada. It's quite different, Mike. The real point is the farther south you go in the western hemisphere, the worse it gets for Native people. And in Canada, we're everywhere, we're in all the processions. The general public is pretty much aware of Native issues, Native culture, Native artists, and people and law, but in the US, it's still very much under the blanket. But that does not daunt the highly qualified organizations who are working on many fronts, and I'm so proud of the work that goes on, even though it's kind of not visible to the general public because of other issues. They are a very small minority you know.

MR: I think you laid this information out in such a wonderfully linear way that it's more digestible than when it's presented by most others.

BSM: Oh, thank you for saying so because I feel like I'm kind of going on and on, and I hope you're not just being polite.

MR: No, no, no, this is beautiful and inspiring, and I think a lot of listeners and readers will go resource some of the stuff you called out just now even further.

BSM: Oh good, good, yeah, please, in the online version, highlight NARF, Native American Rights Fund. Their website is beautiful. NCAI also has some very in depth things to say, and thank you, Mike.

MR: Of course. Please can we go into "No No Keshagesh" again, even though we spoke about it in your last interview?

BSM: Well, really in sentiment, it's kind of a combination between what I was saying in "Universal Soldier," and the attack on greed that's really at the heart of my song "Little Wheel Spin and Spin." So, it's really about environmental greed, and the word "Keshagesh" is a Cree word, and it literally means "greedy guts." But it's playful and the song is playful even though it's about a serious subject. So, "No No Keshagesh" means...it refers to environmental greed, so it's about the "greedy guts" that are just gobbling up everything and making a war over it. It's a serious subject, but it's a way to put it right in front of the people and let them dance, and yell, and sing along with it, and people are just loving it, not only in the US, but also in Europe, Canada, Asia.

MR: Buffy, there's a student from a local college who I invited to the studio here now. His name is Luke Hillis and he has a question for you.

Luke Hillis: Hi Buffy! I was listening to your song "Now That The Buffalo's All Gone," and there's the line: "Has a change come about dear man, or are you still taking our lands?" There's a current issue in the Black Hills. There's a mining company that's moving in trying to make a uranium mine in the southern part of the Black Hills, which could demolish the water tables, potentially poison the water, and completely desecrate such a sacred land. I was wondering if perhaps you were aware of this issue.

BSM: You know, I'm generally aware of it, and I keep hearing about it. I'm not into the details, Luke, but I'm glad you've just spelled it out like that. I couldn't have done better. It's not only there and it's not only in the western hemisphere. The grab for fancy minerals--like lithium in Afghanistan, uranium in the Americas, and also uranium in Sami country in Scandinavia, where the Sami indigenous people in Lapland--it's very similar and the same thing apparently is going on in Australia where people have discovered uranium on the lands of indigenous people there. So, you know, it doesn't surprise me because greed is greed, and companies involved in natural resources have been extremely aggressive since the early days of Standard Oil. And the Navajo, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs was the "War Department," it suddenly became quite different in description, but it never changed that much. It does seem that certain people in the world, whatever country they come from, don't want Indians or anybody else interfering with their complete control of all available lands and natural resources, and unavailable lands and natural resources. So, it's exactly the same thing as The Gold Rush, which, of course, was done by robber barons and corporations who have become very successful or blue chip companies sometimes were involved in just terrible exploitation and it's something that affects us all. You mentioned one area, but this is generally considered "it's just business," so it's something very big. It's something that affects us all, and just like the song "Universal Soldier" is about individual responsibilities for war, we all are responsible, I think, if we allow greedy guys, whoever they are, wherever they come from, to dis-empower the future by controlling everything, especially something like uranium, which is so volatile and so involved in bombs and war and cancer. We need to have very smart, heartful, intelligent people sitting on boards instead of people who are just having their bottoms stuck on the bottom line. This kind of stuff is not just about money. It's not. It's too important.

MR: Thanks, Luke. Do you actually have another question?

LH: I just had another bit to say about that. There's a lady on Pine Ridge Reservation and she's single-handedly defending the Black Hills against this, and she's raising money to raise awareness and create a documentary to help save the Black Hills. She has a website, it's BringBackTheWay.com.

BSM: BringBackTheWay.com. Okay, I'm going to look at it.

MR: Thank you for taking the questions, Buffy.

BSM: You know, Mike, while we have a minute, I don't know whether we mentioned this last time, but something that is very important to me. I sing "Universal Soldier" almost every night, and everybody says, "Yeah that really, really makes sense." But as proud as I am of my generation for having helped to stop the Vietnam War--I mean, you have to remember that they were saying there was no war at the time that I wrote "Universal Soldier." They said, "Oh, you hippies are all crazy." But even though we brought that war to an end, all these years later, we still don't have colleges of the caliber of West Point, and Annapolis and the Army College of War and the Air Force Academy...you know, we don't have colleges of this caliber dedicated to alternative conflict resolution. So where's that at? That's a perfect place for young people and experienced people to be putting our energy in developing ways for young people to actually understand how alternative conflict resolution is done. And we do have little classes, little courses, and small departments dedicated to this, but you know, where is our Annapolis for peace? Where's our West Point for alternative conflict resolution? Where do we put our brains if we're dedicated to this?

MR: That's a very good point and great way of looking at it, and we haven't really taken care of business in this respect.

BSM: Eh, no problem, we can still do this. There's still a lot of good work left to be done in the world, so let's not cry about what we haven't done, let's just do it.

MR: Buffy, we've already discussed a couple of songs from your Running For The Drum album, but let's close that out with your thoughts about your song "Working For The Government."

BSM: Listen to the words, it's all about mercenaries, and G.I. Joes, and James Bond types that we put up on a pedestal in our movies and things. Really listen to the words in this song. This is a funny song.

MR: Absolutely. Buffy, we've gotten so much information and we've also talked about your album. Is there something else we should discuss?

BSM: I've got a whole lot of material at my website. We keep it up to date. There's lots to listen to, lots to learn from, and just thank you for the support, even though I've been, you know, made absent by two political administrations in the past, so I kind of lost a whole lot of momentum in the US. There's still a core of supporters who think this way and I really look forward to next year spending more time with American audiences as I've continually done in other parts of the world.

MR: Buffy, what advice would you have for new artists?

BSM: Oh my gosh. Just play. Don't wait for some kind of mythological businessman to come along and recognize you. You're already great. If you're writing songs and playing music, play for your friends, then play for some more friends. Then play for their friends. Play every place that you can and write and don't worry about the music business. I mean, it's almost nonexistent right now. Now is the time to create your works and put them on the internet. It's almost like the sixties. It used to be a very welcoming place for musicians and artists and songwriters in the sixties, and then it closed up and you couldn't get into a gallery, you couldn't get a concert, you couldn't get a record company. All of that is falling away, and it's back in the hands of the people. So, look at each other's music, enjoy each other, put yours out there too. It's a free world.

MR: Beautiful. Buffy, you'll come back again someday?

BSM: I hope so! Thank you.

MR: Buffy, really, it's been a pleasure, thank you so much.

BSM: Thank you too, Mike.

Photo Scott Debney

Interview Audio Ckut Radio

Buffy Sainte marie Interview ( Irkar Beljaars)
A conversation with the legendary artist and activist

Buffy Sainte marie Interview by buffysaintemarie

Description: An interview aired on the July 28th edition on Native Solidarity News. We talk about her 50 year career in music, the cradle board project and the importance of aboriginal music in the mainstream!

Recording Location: Ckut radio
Language: English
Topical for: Timeless

Michael Bell speaks with Buffy Sainte Marie- Interview The Wire Megazine

Michael Bell speaks with Buffy Sainte Marie
Interview The Wire Megazine

A career that spans decades Buffy Sainte Marie first started performing in the early 60’s, sharpening her craft along side other 60’s legends like Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. By 24 she had toured around the world and was voted 1964 Billboard Best New Artist for her debut album “It’s My Way”. She penned “Universal Soldier”, which became the anthem of the 60’s peace movement while sharing songs about love like “Until It’s Time For You To Go” which was covered by Elvis, Barbara Streisand and Cher. Other songs would be covered by artists as unrelated as Chet Atkins, Janis Joplin and Bobby Darin. She has appeared in film and TV, and her songs have become iconic hits. “Up Where We Belong” received an Academy Award for Best Song in 1981 for the unforgettable rendition Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes were to give for the film “An Officer and A Gentleman”. In 1992, after a 16 year hiatus, she recorded and released “Coincidence and Likely Stories” from her home in Hawaii and via internet with producer Chris Birkett. Always true to her native roots, she founded the Cradleboard Teaching Project in 1996 and developed projects across Mohawk, Cree, Ojibwe, Menominee, Coeur D'Alene, Navajo, Quinault, Hawaiian, and Apache communities in eleven states. 2008 marked the year she was to make her musical comeback onto the scene releasing “Running For The Drum”. An Academy Award-winning Canadian First Nations musician, composer, visual artist, pacifist, educator and social activist, Buffy spoke to me by phone from her home in the mountains of Hawaii surrounded by her chickens, goats, computers and memories....

Mb: Hi Buffy! My apologies, I’m late calling.

BSM: It’s always troublesome because we never know in Hawaii what time everybody thinks we’re at. It’s very easy to get confused.

Mb: So you’re in Hawaii?

BSM: I’ve lived here for most of my life.

Mb: What a beautiful place to live.

BSM: It is. It’s nice. It’s just a very long sit-down to go anywhere else because we’re in the most isolated spot on earth. Hawaii is more isolated than anywhere else on the globe.

Mb: You’re flying to everywhere you need to go...

BSM: My gosh, thousands of miles of ocean to everywhere. It’s a great place to live but ... I’m out there!

Mb: So, you know, there’s just too many things to talk about, so what do you want to talk about?

BSM: Did anyone send you the new album or the new video?

Mb: Yes they did.

BSM: Ok, start there and if you want to back up from there you can.

Mb: OK, how was making the new record?

BSM: It was great. I made it at home, as I have the last two albums. I just make it when I feel like it. I flew my co-producer in from France five times. So, we just recorded at home and got it the way we wanted to do it, and boy it’s a lot of fun. We’ve been out promoting it a little bit, because it hasn’t been out too long, and... oh man, my summer schedule... I get tired just looking at it! It’s all over Europe, all over Canada, we’re going to the U.S.... The album is being released in a staggered release so we don’t have to be everywhere at once. Boy, people really like it and I Iike that!

Mb: And you really like the recoding process?

BSM: Ya! Chris Birkett and I, this is our third album together so we know each other real well and he’s real nice to work with, so we enjoy it. There’s just far less pressure on us than if we were on the clock in somebody’s studio in some city... and it’s pretty out here too!

Mb: So at this point in your career do you feel like you’re able to record and write the way you want, shooting from the hip, as it were, rather than worrying about CD sales?

BSM: (Laughs) An artist better not! Things are different now because I’m not under contract to a big corporation so... I’ve always made records the same way. The only difference has been whether I’m making the artistic decisions or somebody else is. I much rather prefer to be in the driver’s seat since I’m the one who writes the songs and records them and all. So now I have a distribution deal with EMI where they do the marketing and distribution but otherwise no one but me and Chris have anything to do with making the album. It’s nice because artists are artists and business is business.

Mb: What do you think of the way the industry works now?

BSM: Of course it’s inevitable and in many ways it’s much better for fans and for artists, but it’s also a very competitive world. Yet it does seem kind of “fairer” now for people to be able to find just the songs they want.... to be able to get music from all over the world right into their house... I like it. I looked forward to it for a very long time and I tried to talk several record companies into getting interested in “this internet thing” and they didn’t want anything to do with it. I was real real early. I was making electronic music in the 60’s and went to movie scoring and was using computers starting in the mid 80’s for recording. When it all was just bubbling under I spoke to several record companies and people in the recording industry about it, but they just didn’t want to know. They didn’t understand how it would work. It was too early for them.

Mb: So you’re obviously a big fan of the internet.

BSM: Ya, sure! I’m a fan of communication. I think it’s wonderful. There’s casual communication and social communication and business communication but there’s also artistic communication. I’ve been using computers to record my music and to record my paintings and record my writings for a very long time. That’s what a computer does. It allows you to record things much better than the old equipment did. To record it and manipulate it and to change it and develop it and save lots of different versions and then to be able to distribute it to a very narrowly targeted audience or to put it out to where everyone can hear it... it’s much more in the hands of the artist now.

Mb: How do you feel about people being able to download your music for free.

BSM: Well, if I offer it for free, then I expect them to download it for free. I think things should be free anyway. But the reality is that not everything can be. I have never liked record companies stealing from artists and I don’t like audiences stealing from artists. I prefer downloads for pay. Then it’s an option on the part of the artist to what you want to give for free. I give away a lot of things for free. I founded the Cradleboard Teaching Project in the early 90’s and my dream was to have enough money and to have it develop far enough so that I could give it away for free to everybody on the internet and now that dream has come true. So I think that’s the idea, to make things available without having all kinds of middlemen between the artist and the audience.

Mb: What about your visual art?

BSM: You can see it online. If people want to buy the real deal, then they can get in touch with us. I think the images, whether it’s mine or some other artist’s... the images that artists make and the records that we make and the songs and the writings that we make are best if shared, but that’s not the business model that developed in the Middle East Judeo Christian, European kings model. It’s kind of a money model... a Caesar owns everything model! Everybody else just works here! The business model that developed has nothing to do with art that artists make. There will always be someone who wants to stand between the audience and the artist and take their piece, but now more than ever an artist can do things in a new way or a unique way or in a way they like. There are just more options now!

Mb: When people hear your music or hear your name for that matter, what do want them to think?

BSM: Oh god, I don’t care! (laughs) I’m a songwriter and various songs are interesting to various people for various reasons. Some people only want to hear “Universal Soldier” and other people only want to hear “Up Where We Belong”, and it’s all ok with me cause I like it all!

Mb: But as a communicator, what do you want to communicate?

BSM: I want people to take away something from a concert or hearing a record. I want them to take away something they didn’t have when they came in; a way of thinking or some pleasure. Some of my songs are topical and they are about being affective in the real world and some are just love songs and some are just fun to dance to.

at Winnipeg's Aboriginal Centre. An on-stage interview with Dave McLeod from NCI FM. Part of the events surrounding Buffy Sainte-Marie's receiving Winnipeg Folk Festival Artistic Achievement Award. Photo Denis Buchan.

Native American Folk Legend - Interview Audio NPR Music

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In a career spanning more than four decades, Cree Indian singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie has recorded numerous albums and written Oscar-winning songs. In the 1960s folk revival, she was a folk icon among Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. On her first album in 13 years, Running for the Drum, she expands on the inventive mix of Native American rhythms, electronica and folk music she began many years ago.

The second track of the new album, "Cho Cho Fire," is a driving rock song featuring a 30-year-old field recording.

"The Black Lodge Singers were at a powwow maybe 30 years ago," Sainte-Marie tells host Scott Simon. "My nephew went to the meeting in Saskatchewan and recorded a snippet of them when they were kids. And they have gone on to become one of the most beloved powwow groups in the world. I took a snippet of this 30-year-old cassette, and I embedded it into a new song I was writing called 'Cho Cho Fire.' "

Sainte-Marie was one of the first songwriters to take advantage of emerging music technology in the late '60s. On her 1969 album Illuminations, nearly all the electronically processed sounds came from Sainte-Marie's voice or guitar.

"I really had a head start on digital technology, because I entered it by the way of music," Sainte-Marie says.

On Tour To Get Away

In between albums, Sainte-Marie keeps herself busy. For the past 13 years, most of Sainte-Marie's time has been occupied by The Cradleboard Teaching Project, which provides updated curricula for educators about Native Americans.

"Native American people wanted to be understood, because Native American people suffer from being misperceived," Sainte-Marie says. "There's just nothing out there in the mainstream curriculum."

Apart from her music career, Sainte-Marie was once a regular on Sesame Street, where she taught children about sibling rivalry, Native American people and practices, and breast-feeding.

America The Beautiful

In 2002, John Herrington was the first Native American to fly in space, and NASA invited Sainte-Marie to be a part of the launch. She says she was thinking about the rural places in the Western Hemisphere where "you can still see the stars and the trees and the animals." That inspired her to sing and eventually record "America the Beautiful" for Running for the Drum.

A Song For A Dollar

Sainte-Marie is a big proponent of music on the Internet. While she doesn't consider herself a techie, she says she uses programs for art, songwriting and swapping music.

"People think we aren't making any money on the Internet, but we weren't making any money when record companies were controlling everything, either," she says.

Case in point: Sainte-Marie gave away the publishing rights to her famous tune "Universal Soldier" for one dollar.

The story goes that The Highwaymen came into The Gaslight in Greenwich Village in New York and heard "Universal Soldier." They came up to her and said they wanted to record the song. When asked who the publisher was, Sainte-Marie responded, "What's that?"

Photo marechal jacques

An Interview With Buffy Sainte-Marie by Mike Ragogna

Interview by Mike Ragogna for http://www.huffingtonpost.com

You most likely know Buffy Sainte-Marie from her many Vanguard folk albums or instantly identifiable hits. She's penned An Officer And A Gentleman's Academy Award-winning theme song "Up Where We Belong" (released by Joe Cocker & Jennifer Warnes), plus the classics "Piney Wood Hills" (recorded by country legend Bobby Bare), "Cod'ine" (covered by Donovan, The Charlatans, and Quicksilver Messenger Service), and "Until It's Time For You To Go" that was immortalized by Elvis Presley then later, Neil Diamond. But Buffy Sainte-Marie is a part of our culture beyond music, having appeared on Sesame Street semi-regularly between 1976 and 1981, having been married to creative powerhouse Jack Nitzsche, and having promoted and campaigned for environmental and social issues as well as the collective interests of Native Americans and First Nations for at least four decades. To this day, her peace anthem and hit from the sixties, "Universal Soldier"--also covered by the likes of Donovan, Glen Campbell, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, The Highwaymen, and even Chumbawamba--enjoys continued airplay (especially as a bumper) on NPR and Pacifica stations, it originally having been written as a reaction to the Vietnam War. This being Woodstock Week and with topics on Buffy's newly-released album Running For The Drum ranging from activist anthems to mature love songs, it seemed a perfect time to catch-up with the artist, her music having directly or indirectly influencing many of those that appeared at the culture-changing event.

Mike Ragogna: Buffy, you've always been associated with a class of folk artists that includes Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Tom Rush, Eric Andersen, Fred Neil, and many other mid- to late-sixties troubadours. But your influence reaches beyond that genre, to those acoustic artists that later became pop music's "singer-songwriters," many of them moved by the depth and commitment of your material.

Buffy Sainte-Marie: Thank you, I always thought that the art of the three-minute song is almost like journalism. Sometimes you can say something in that amount of time that would take somebody else a four-hundred page book that would just wind up on some shelf. It's so direct and immediate.

MR: That passion they admired is very strong throughout your new album, a perfect example being its socially-charged opening track "No No Keshagesh."

BSM: I'm writing all the time, and as a songwriter, I always think of myself as somebody with a camera taking snapshots of what's going on. The spirit behind "No No Keshagesh" and "Working For The Government" is the same that inspires the songs on my album Coincidence And Likely Stories which are very much along the same lines politically. They're kind of crystal clear photographs with a unique perspective because I'm so fortunate to have airplane tickets in my life, and I get to travel to reservations, to cities, and from one country to another. So the spirit behind some of these songs--you know, there's really not a good name for it, "social consciousness" just sounds so stuffy and "protest" is not quite right. But these songs are always around because things like environmental greed are always bubbling under the surface.

MR: Running For The Drum is pretty clear on its politics, but it also has many different styles with a nice balance of love songs.

BSM: Though I'm writing in that vein, I'm also still writing those love songs, country songs and fun songs--like the one that sounds like an Elvis Presley tune ("Blue Sunday"), and the one I did with Taj Mahal ("I Bet My Heart On You"). It's always a big mix with me but I'm always seeing that socially conscious, environmental protection point of view.

MR: Some complain change is coming too slowly, but do you feel like we're on the verge of some major changes?

BSM: Absolutely! And what's beautiful about it is we're all a part of it. You know, I campaigned for President Obama, so you're preaching to the choir here. [Laughs] What impressed me is not that he was from my home state of Hawaii or that he's half black/half white, but that he's a professor of constitutional law with great experience in communities. To me, that's a very, very significant qualification. I think he's the most highly qualified person to ever be in the White House...I mean, a professor of constitutional law...who'd a-thunk it, you know?

I know about our own impatience and about how slowly it takes to do things right, but I'm as hopeful as I was before the election, in spite of the ups and downs and daily life. I think things are getting better everywhere, even though we had eight years when we didn't hear anybody's really heartfelt, well thought-out viewpoints. Everyone was kind of muffled and quiet and a little sacred. During those campaign days, I met thousands of people who'd been holding their enthusiasm and their positivity in check out of fear. So to have campaigned among people who really had it together and who were just waiting for the right moment said so much to me.

MR: And with the exception of folks like Jon Stewart, Keith Olbermann, and some talk show hosts on Air America, the media mostly let those guys do what they wanted without challenging them.

BSM: Yes, yes, yes! Isn't that something? If you're lucky enough to be going back and forth between Indian reservations and the city, and if you travel to Europe, you can see the discrepancy between the American press during conservative administrations and the rest of the world's take on us. It kind of stretches your mind. But to see the window shades open and the sun coming in...people who had once been huddling in the dark in fear in America are now vital and positive, willing and able to express the hopes and dreams of what came out of that election.

MR: In the past, you've received grants to educate the public on Native American issues, you've instituted various successful social programs, and served as a positive role model while appearing on Sesame Street. What are you up to these days and have the issues for Native Americans changed between then and now?

BSM: Actually, they're the same. Regarding environmental and Native American issues, it used to be, like fifteen years ago, that you'd see Native American people standing on the side of the road with signs that said "Protect Mother Earth" and people would drive by and smirk. On Coincidence And Likely Stories, there are songs called "Disinformation" and "The Priests of The Golden Bull." They point out things like how uranium waste is dumped onto Indian reservations, and the rest of the population doesn't see it happen. But when you go to your kitchen and turn on your water tap, quickly you realize that we all belong to that same river. So very often, Indian reservations are the front line of things that will impact the general population later, whether it's race issues, neglect, cheating, thievery done by people in office and, of course, environmental issues.

You know, when I first started out in the sixties, I was a young singer with too much money. I had all these airplane tickets connecting me with the great stages of the Americas, Asia and Europe. After I got done with a concert, I would fly up to the Arctic, to Scandinavia, and spend time with the Sami people there, or if I had a concert in New York, I'd be up at a Mohawk reservation. Same thing in Canada, New Zealand and Australia. So for a long time, I've used my concert career to connect me with indigenous people...just for the fun of it! I started an organization in the sixties called the Nihewan Foundation, and over the years, I developed it into something called The Cradleboard Teaching Project. We write core curriculum in science, geography, social studies, etc. from a North American Indian perspective. We offer it free online to educate everybody about us, mostly because it presents the Native American identity directly to students and teachers. And we were taking kids on the internet--before anyone knew the word "internet"--in the eighties. We connected a school in Hawaii with a school my cousin was running in Saskatchewan. We were setting up study partnerships between classes even then.

MR: So in addition to music, you spend an enormous amount of time on the project.

BSM: That's my other job! I enjoy writing curriculum as much as writing songs only it's multi-media. It's all interactive multi-media curricula about Native American perspectives. They're real school subjects, so they match national content standards. It's not one of these deals where you study about how these Indians lived here and those Indians lived there, and it's all beads and feathers and shallow, and not about anybody. This is about real subjects through Native American eyes. We've had tremendous support from the Kellogg Foundation, the Ford Foundation and others over a ten-year period. Two years ago, our dream came true and we got to put it online free.

MR: Getting back to the album, so many records these days are made from a "one sound" generic approach, but on Running For The Drum, you use many different styles.

BSM: All of my albums have been real diverse, from my very first album all the way through since they're made up of all the songs in my head when I'm putting it together. I think that came up in the sixties before everything got "genrefied," you know, when record companies had to know which bin to put it in.

MR: The song "Little Wheel Spin And Spin" is a great example of our interconnectedness you spoke of earlier.

BSM: Right, and we're all a part of it (the wheel). If we're going to petty thieve the Five & Tens, at the same time, shouldn't we be looking at politicians and corporate thieves? I mean, isn't it all the same thing and shouldn't we all be keeping an eye on that too? It's all about individual responsibility, but so was "Universal Soldier."

MR: "Universal Soldier" is considered one of the great "protest" songs. You really dig in when you write this kind of material.

BSM: When it comes to writing a song like that as opposed to "Up Where We Belong" or "Until It's Time For You To Go," it's like writing a thesis for a professor, and I really want to get an "A" and she doesn't like me very much. [Laughs] So I really try to make them thoughtful.

MR: What's the story behind your rework of "America The Beautiful" and your singing it to Nasa's Commander John Herrington?

BSM: That was fun! Nasa flew a lot of people from his tribe and me in for his ride. He's a friend of mine and I'm very proud of him. Now, if you look that song up online, you'll see that many people have written different verses, so I wrote my own and added that additional introduction and middle section. Our country is more than just nation states, it really is our country.

MR: In your notes for "Still This Love Goes On," you say how you remind yourself of nature whenever you're in a situation that removes you from it.

BSM: That's my medicine. On Hawaii, we have this local navy base, and I have security clearance to go and use their telescopes. I'm an amateur astronomer, and when you look at the stars...or even when you spend time with your kitty cat in your lap...to me, it's the most beautiful, natural phenomenon...the earth. It's what connects us all together with everything and each other. Wherever you are in the world, nature is always there, even if it's hidden for the moment. It's a part of us and never goes away. To me, it relates person to person and people to people...we really have a lot in common.