Up where she belongs

Q: What is your impression of today’s aboriginal music scene?

A: Aboriginal music has flourished just as I had hoped. This is a dream come true for me, to see aboriginal people in straight country music, just going fa-de-dah along with everybody else. Or country music that includes a little bit of a grassroots feel like [her 1996 song] Darling Don’t Cry – that was one of the first in country music to get a lot of play in country music television, which is co-written by me and Edmund Bull of Red Bull, the powwow group.

Now you have aboriginal people in classical music, doing straight classical music or doing combination music, in pop, in hip hop — just every genre, which is to be expected.

Q: How does that compare to earlier in your career?

A: When I started out, there weren’t any aboriginal singers travelling around the world. There were a lot of singers that I knew, but almost everybody stayed in one place — [Narragansett Indian] Peter La Farge in the 1960s singing in Greenwich Village, [songwriter and later actor] Floyd Westerman was writing songs — he’s Sioux. But most of the singers of those times weren’t given any major exposure.

Buffy Sainte Marie sings at a benefit concert on Piapot Reserve north of Regina on Sept. 8, 1975. (Canadian Press)

I had a lot of luck very early. I was rich and famous by the time I was 23. As I would travel around to grassroots communities, my perceptions were not the same as if I had come from those grassroots communities. I had finished college, I had travelled around the world, I had success and the confidence that goes with it. So if I had a concert in New York and the concert was over, I’d be in Akwasasne or Six Nations or one of the reservations that was a reasonable distance away. Same thing if I was in Calgary — I’d be out at the reserve. Even in the international community, if I had a concert in Sydney, Australia, I’d be out with people there. Just because I was interested and because it was fun.

I started to build up not just an understanding and a love for people, but also a repertoire of what they were going through. I began to see that indigenous people are all in the same boat, in being milked and exploited by various European cultures, and this didn’t go down very well [with me].

When I was travelling around the traditional music was very much intact. I would sit at the drums with my uncles and they welcomed me. They didn’t chase me away. We all sat around. They taught me songs and we learned together. That’s how you learn: just singing along. Yet their perception of solving the dilemmas in which they found themselves, their perception of the challenges, they didn’t really know very much about Indian issues.

When they heard songs that I wrote in the '60s, like Now that the Buffalo’s Gone, that song didn’t only make sense in the state of New York, where Kinzua Dam was being built — it made sense in communities all over the world where the gobbledygreeds were forcing people off their traditional lands in order that someone could make a fortune building a bridge.

Q: At what point, do you think, did such a range of aboriginal music become widely accepted?

A: I first noticed that people were ripping off grassroots Indian music in the 1990s. I was invited to participate with a guy in Europe who was, I think, inappropriately exploiting public domain traditional songs – by Navajo, Cree, Hopis, and he’d put in a drum machine behind it. In other words, the guy did not have a career in anything else, but as soon as he grabbed those Smithsonian recordings — treasures — all of a sudden he had a career.

The first time I heard about other people incorporating aboriginal music into pop was the 1990s, and I had been doing it since the 1960s. I was a bit different. I wasn’t grabbing other people’s recordings, I was using my own. Starwalker was one of the first that made an impact in the music business. Starwalker I first recorded in 1975 and I recorded it again in the 1990s [on the album Coincidence and Likely Stories] and it was included in a greatest hits album. So nobody up until then had ever heard aboriginal sounds in pop records.

It took a while, because people at the grassroots level, they loved it. But people in radio stations didn’t get it. As a matter of fact, when I first recorded in the early ’90s, the record company didn’t want to record Starwalker or Wounded Knee —they just didn’t get it. They didn’t know why anyone would want to sing about red Indians.

Buffy Sainte-Marie performs. (Paquin Entertainment)

Q: You played a role in creating the Juno award for Music of Aboriginal Canada. What is the story behind that?

A: I played a minor role. Elaine Bomberry and Curtis Johnnie, also known as Shingoose, they did the lion’s share of the work. We all campaigned and we let CARAS [Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which manages the Junos] know. We had to show them that there was enough recording going on – enough artists, enough studios, enough producers, enough writers, you know, that we had a track record. There were certain rules and so we all went together to CARAS and CARAS had done their homework. They all agreed, they were very well-prepared.

I just think that we need two categories: one for [aboriginal] pop and one for traditional [aboriginal] music. Pop and traditional shouldn’t be together. Traditional is a huge category and so is pop, but they’re not the same. Grassroots powwow groups should not be having to compete with people who are out doing pop shows and being on television. People on the pop side of it have an unfair advantage when it comes to exposure. And the grassroots powwow groups are, I think, a national treasure.

Q: Do you think anyone has picked up the mantle of activism that you carried for so long?

A: I don’t know. I think just about everybody is a little bit sensitive to what needs to be remedied and improved. I’m not out there listening all the time. I keep looking for somebody who’s writing songs of enlightened protest. I mean, a song like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is very tough song about very real incidents, but because it’s in a hot rock ’n’ roll track, people get caught up in it before they realize they’re in a protest song. That’s kind of a tough song to write, anyway. I don’t hear anyone writing Universal Soldier or Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee anywhere – white people, black people, brown people. I just don’t hear it.

Hip hop has the attitude. That’s kind of where it is.

Q: Are you still writing songs?

A: All the time. It’s like dreaming for me. I don’t try to write, but some nights you dream, some nights you don’t. I spend time writing curriculum and it’s all informed by what’s going on in my head. I write curriculum the same way I write songs. To be able to say something in three and a half minutes that would take somebody else 400 pages is a certain skill.

I write in two ways. It’s either impassioned like a love song, it’s in my head, it’s in my heart, it’s like a dream – it’s no work at all. To write a song like Universal Soldier or Bury My Heart is different because you have the original passion, you have the real incidents that nobody wants to hear about – I mean who wants to hear about that? So that’s when I say, this is exactly the same as when you had to write a thesis for a professor who wanted to flunk you and you were determined to get an A-plus. You have to think it through.

To me it’s about being effective. It’s not about fame, it’s not about looking good, it’s not about being louder or more angry than someone else. It’s not about that. It’s about being effective.