Buffy Sainte-Marie, (born Beverly Sainte-Marie, c. February 20, 1941) is an Indigenous Canadian-American singer-songwriter, musician, Oscar-winning composer, visual artist, educator, pacifist, and social activist. Throughout her career in all of these areas, her work has focused on issues facing Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Her singing and writing repertoire also includes subjects of love, war, religion, and mysticism. She has won recognition, awards and honors for her music as well as her work in education and social activism.
Sainte-Marie was born in 1941on the Piapot 75 reserve in the Qu'Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, Canada. She was adopted by Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie, a Wakefield, Massachusetts couple of Mi'kmaq descent. In 1964, on a return trip to the Piapot Cree reserve in Canada for a powwow, she was welcomed and (in a Cree Nation context) adopted by the youngest son of Chief Piapot, Emile Piapot and his wife, Clara Starblanket Piapot, who added to Sainte-Marie's cultural value and place in native culture. She plays piano and guitar, self-taught in her childhood and teen years. In college some of her songs, "Ananias", the Indian lament, "Now That the Buffalo's Gone" and "Mayoo Sto Hoon" (a cover of a Hindi Bollywood song "Mayus To Hoon Waade Se Tere" from the 1960 movie Barsaat Ki Raat) were already in her repertoire. By 1962, in her early twenties, she was touring alone, developing her craft and performing in various concert halls, folk music festivals and First Nations reservations across the United States, Canada and abroad. She spent a considerable amount of time in the coffeehouses of downtown Toronto's old Yorkville district, and New York City's Greenwich Village as part of the early to mid-1960s folk scene, often alongside other emerging Canadian contemporaries, such as Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell.
In 1963, recovering from a throat infection, Sainte-Marie became addicted to codeine and recovering from the experience became the basis of her song "Cod'ine", later covered by Donovan, Janis Joplin, the Charlatans, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Man, the Litter, the Leaves, Jimmy Gilmer, Gram Parsons, Charles Brutus McClay, the Barracudas (spelled "Codeine"), the Golden Horde, Nicole Atkins and Courtney Love. Also in 1963, she witnessed wounded soldiers returning from Vietnam war at a time when the U.S. government was denying involvement – which inspired her protest song, "Universal Soldier" which was released on her debut album, It's My Way on Vanguard Records in 1964, and later became a hit for both Donovan and Glen Campbell.
She was subsequently named Billboard magazine's Best New Artist. Some of her songs addressing the mistreatment of Native Americans, such as "Now That the Buffalo's Gone" (1964) and "My Country 'Tis of Thy People You're Dying" (1964, included on her 1966 album), created controversy at the time. In 1967, she released Fire and Fleet and Candlelight, which contained her interpretation of the traditional Yorkshire dialect song "Lyke Wake Dirge". Sainte-Marie's other well-known songs include "Mister Can't You See", (a Top 40 U.S. hit in 1972); "He's an Indian Cowboy in the Rodeo"; and the theme song of the movie Soldier Blue. She appeared on Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest with Pete Seeger in 1965 and several Canadian Television productions from the 1960s to the 1990s, and other TV shows such as American Bandstand, Soul Train, The Johnny Cash Show and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson; and sang the opening song "The Circle Game" (written by Joni Mitchell) in Stuart Hagmann's film The Strawberry Statement (1970) Then Came Bronson; episode 20 "Mating Dance for Tender Grass" (1970) sang and acted.
In 1983, Sainte-Marie became the first indigenous person to win an Oscar. Her song "Up Where We Belong", co-written for the film An Officer and a Gentleman, won both the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 55th Academy Awards and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song. In 1997, she founded the Cradleboard Teaching Project, an educational curriculum devoted to better understanding Native Americans.
