Music
Landmark
Buffy Sainte-Marie
born 1941
Songwriter, and six decades of campaigning for Indigenous rights
Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the Canada Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
A songwriter who has been arguing for Indigenous rights in her music since the 1960s, was quietly blacklisted from American radio for it, and co-wrote an Academy Award-winning song.
Buffy Sainte-Marie took a teaching degree and studied oriental philosophy at the University of Massachusetts before emerging from the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1960s with songs that were unusually direct for it. Her first record, It's My Way!, came out on Vanguard in 1964 and Billboard named her best new artist of the year.
Universal Soldier, written that year, puts the responsibility for war on the individual who agrees to fight rather than on governments, and became one of the decade's standards — though Donovan had the hit with it, and she had sold the publishing for a dollar before understanding what she had; she bought it back years later for twenty-five thousand. Cod'ine, written about her own dependence on prescribed medication, was taken up by Janis Joplin, Donovan and later Courtney Love. Now That the Buffalo's Gone and My Country 'Tis of Thy People You're Dying took the treatment of Indigenous peoples in North America as their subject at a point when almost no popular song did.
She was blacklisted from American radio for the politics — something she only learned years later, when documents surfaced showing her name on lists circulated to broadcasters — and her career in the United States was quietly suppressed through the Johnson and Nixon years while she remained successful elsewhere.
Up Where We Belong, which she co-wrote with Jack Nitzsche and Will Jennings for An Officer and a Gentleman, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1983. She spent five years on Sesame Street through the late 1970s, in large part so that a nation of children would see Indigenous people in the present tense rather than only in history, and she breastfed her son on air.
She was also unusually early to the technology. Coincidence and Likely Stories, released in 1992, was made on a computer at her home in Hawaii and sent to her producer in London down a telephone line — one of the first albums delivered to a label over the internet — and she has worked in digital painting since the 1980s. She founded the Nihewan Foundation in 1969 to put Indigenous students through education, and later the Cradleboard Teaching Project, which built curriculum material about Indigenous peoples for use in ordinary classrooms.
Power in the Blood won the Polaris Music Prize in 2015, when she was seventy-four. She has won multiple Juno awards and was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.
Universal Soldier, written that year, puts the responsibility for war on the individual who agrees to fight rather than on governments, and became one of the decade's standards — though Donovan had the hit with it, and she had sold the publishing for a dollar before understanding what she had; she bought it back years later for twenty-five thousand. Cod'ine, written about her own dependence on prescribed medication, was taken up by Janis Joplin, Donovan and later Courtney Love. Now That the Buffalo's Gone and My Country 'Tis of Thy People You're Dying took the treatment of Indigenous peoples in North America as their subject at a point when almost no popular song did.
She was blacklisted from American radio for the politics — something she only learned years later, when documents surfaced showing her name on lists circulated to broadcasters — and her career in the United States was quietly suppressed through the Johnson and Nixon years while she remained successful elsewhere.
Up Where We Belong, which she co-wrote with Jack Nitzsche and Will Jennings for An Officer and a Gentleman, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1983. She spent five years on Sesame Street through the late 1970s, in large part so that a nation of children would see Indigenous people in the present tense rather than only in history, and she breastfed her son on air.
She was also unusually early to the technology. Coincidence and Likely Stories, released in 1992, was made on a computer at her home in Hawaii and sent to her producer in London down a telephone line — one of the first albums delivered to a label over the internet — and she has worked in digital painting since the 1980s. She founded the Nihewan Foundation in 1969 to put Indigenous students through education, and later the Cradleboard Teaching Project, which built curriculum material about Indigenous peoples for use in ordinary classrooms.
Power in the Blood won the Polaris Music Prize in 2015, when she was seventy-four. She has won multiple Juno awards and was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.
- CBC News — Who is the real Buffy Sainte-Marie?
- CBC News — Buffy Sainte-Marie pushes back against CBC investigation
- CBC News — Piapot family reaffirms Buffy Sainte-Marie as their relative
- The Canadian Encyclopedia — Buffy Sainte-Marie
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