Six decades of Sainte-Marie’s protest songs prove prophetic

The idea of decolonization has only relatively recently become intensely relevant to Canadians and our current national dialogue over pipelines, climate change and environmental stewardship — but it has informed the life of one of our great artists, singer/songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie. While the Idle No More movement and its recent judicial victories gave volume to the struggle, Sainte-Marie has been talking about it since the early 1960s.

“Every time people ask me, ‘How do we solve this problem, or that problem in your opinion?’ it’s always the same answer: Stay calm and decolonize,” she’s quoted as saying in Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography.

Biographer Andrea Warner chronicles the career of this unique musician in her new authorized biography in a prose style that is literate and informative without gratuitous literary flourishes. The book is structured as a relatively straightforward linear biography with a slight twist: each stage of her journey, and the chapters of the book, are defined by one of her iconic ballads, from Uni

versal Soldier to Cod’ine to Up Where We Belong to Power in the Blood. Along the way we encounter musical icons Joni Mitchell, among others; Sainte-Marie’s abusive exhusband, music producer Jack Nitzsche, even, and her famous appearances on Sesame Street.

But the most compelling part of Sainte-Marie’s story is her commitment to the liberation of North America’s Indigenous peoples, a commitment that was intensely personal and grounded in a struggle with her own identity.

Sainte-Marie was born on a Cree reservation in Saskatchewan, but was adopted at birth by a white family in Massachusetts. Her hometown was so pearly white Buffy dubbed it Javex, USA — it roused in

her questions early on about her true origins.

“Indigenity is such an interesting topic and it’s the kind of conversation you couldn’t have fifty years ago,” she says. “Generations of Indigenous people were legislatively denied access to their mother tongue, ancestral cultures and philosophies and were taken away from their family homes as children.”

Sainte-Marie revealed the plight of First Nations peoples decades before it was openly spoken about, and many of her

most iconic songs — My Country ’Tis of Thy People Dying or Now That the Buffalo’s Goneor Bury My Heart at Wounded

Knee — profoundly express her angst and rage at the Indigenous experience.

Sainte-Marie has enjoyed a brilliant career, but not to the same heights of fame as Mitchell, or Neil Young, or others. She had an ambivalent relationship with “show biz” and was reluctant to have a business shark shepherding her career the way Mitchell had with David Geffen.

“I wasn’t being commodified,” she’s quoted as saying. And she studiously avoided Los Angeles to live in rural Hawaii.

Her focus was on what she called the “bigger picture:” the systemic greed, inequality and injustice within and outside the music industry.

“Colonialism doesn’t just bleed Indigenous people, it bleeds everybody, except the jerks running the racket,” she says, pointing out how the music industry mimics they way Indigenous people were exploited by their European colonizers.

In her heyday, some people got riled up when she sang her protest songs.

“They were not ready to see what I was saying is true.”

But, in light of our current era of truth and reconciliation, Sainte-Marie’s vision was certainly prophetic.