Legendary singer insists she isn’t a disrupter, just someone trying to ‘make the facts clearer’
Buffy Sainte-Marie and Andrea Warner are planning a road trip.
Officially, it’s a promotional tour for Buffy Sainte-Marie, Warner’s authorized biography of the iconic Cree musician, but the two look for ways to sneak in time together. After the Juno Awards in March, Sainte-Marie stayed behind in Vancouver for a couple days before heading home to Hawaii. Warner, who lives in the city, had promised to take Sainte-Marie to a cat café.
“Buffy was so happy and she just immediately got on the floor to play with all the cats,” recalls Warner.
There’s a charming photo included in the book from that day. Both of them have wide grins, while a cat perches nearby, unaware of how close it is sitting to a music legend.
“We built this lovely friendship,” Warner says. “We both really believe in the book, but we also just selfishly want to hang out.”
Their story began in 2015, when Warner, an associate producer at CBC Music, first interviewed Saint-Marie about her album, Power in the
Blood, which would win the Polaris Music Prize. Warner’s debut book, We Oughta Know: How Four Women Ruled the ’90s and Changed Canadian Music, had just been released. That book chronicles the careers of Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain, Sarah McLachlan and Céline Dion. It was a highly personal project — and she was starting to feel that connection with Sainte-Marie.
Warner observed that, after more than 50 years, Saint-Marie was still producing category-defying music — and yet there was little written about her life.
“She’s been quite ignored and overlooked by mainstream music periodicals and that’s just such an injustice,” Warner says. “It’s very reflective of how colonialism and the patriarchy have shaped the music industry. It’s frustrating, but it was also thrilling because now she’s getting to tell her story in her way.”
Warner and Saint-Marie’s atypical author-biographer relationship is reflected in the book’s warm conversational tone, and stands as a testament to an artist who defines success on her own terms.
“Buffy has been so engaged in the whole process,” Warner says. “She was very instructive and supportive.”
Before Warner signed a contract in 2016 with Vancouver publisher Greystone Books, the pair began interviews, which extended over 40 hours, by phone and in the back of a tour bus. The biography unfolds with long quotes from Sainte-Marie, including several “interludes” in which she reveals her thoughts on fame, happiness and surviving abuse.
“I really wanted to centre Buffy’s voice,” Warner says. “I could bring a music-critic expertise and a feminist lens, but I’m not there to insert any white settler vantage points. I was much more concerned with creating a trusting, generous space in which she could talk about her childhood trauma, the trauma later in her life. I wanted people to see themselves in her, her struggles and also how she worked through them.”
Beverly Sainte-Marie was born in Saskatchewan to Cree parents in the early1940s, then adopted and raised in a restrictive, white Massachusetts town.
Sainte-Marie believes she was born on the Piapot reserve in the Qu’Appelle Valley. She was adopted from the reserve for reasons that were never fully known, and without the birth records there is no offi- cial reason for the adoption (birth records at that point were spotty at best, and often went missing). She was adopted into a white family, though her mother, Winifred identified as part Mi’kmaq.
Abused for years by two family members, Sainte-Marie found early escape in her prodigious musical talent and in the natural world. While some fans’ memories may return to her groundbreaking appearances on Sesame Street — when she became the first woman to breastfeed on mainstream television — SainteMarie’s technological achievements are less well-known. In 1969, Sainte-Marie’s Illu
minations became the first quadraphonic electronic vocal album. Coincidence and Likely
Stories, from 1992, was the first pre-internet album produced using file-sharing software. But despite her many accomplishments, Sainte-Marie had to fight for recognition and compensation.
Stories infuriate, such as how Elvis Presley’s management tried to force Sainte-Marie to relinquish publishing rights after he covered her song “Until It’s Time for You to Go.” After she became the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar for the song “Up Where We Belong,” Sainte-Marie had to share the award with her thenproducer-husband Jack Nitzsche, who was so abusive and dismissive of her contributions, she retreated from music for years.
The book also tracks SainteMarie’s lifelong activism for Indigenous rights and the peace movement, which led to her being blacklisted by the U.S. government. Despite spending her career standing up to systems trying to erase her existence, Sainte-Marie says in the book she doesn’t think of herself as a disrupter, but rather someone trying to “make the facts clearer.”
Warner attests to her good friend’s power: “Buffy hopefully knows that she has been changing the world for the last 55 years and counting. And she continues to change the world simply by telling the truth.”