‘First lady of Indigenous music’: Buffy Sainte-Marie on her storied career

Buffy Sainte-Marie believes that successful persuasion requires two ingredients: love and patience. 

When the Indigenous songwriter wrote the 1964 anti-war song “Universal Soldier,” she imagined how a college student might write an essay to sway a professor who thought differently. That anthem became a folk-rock standard. But two other songs she wrote that year, “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone” and “My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying,” weren’t wholly embraced. Many people weren’t yet receptive to messages about the mistreatment of North America’s Indigenous people. Despite that experience, the songwriter remains undaunted about how she tackles difficult subjects.

“I do it with a good heart,” she says during a conversation via Zoom. “You’re not there to scold someone for not knowing.”

That approach has served Ms. Sainte- Marie well over a storied career that’s being celebrated in a new documentary on PBS, “Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On,” which airs Tuesday, Nov. 22.

The Cree musician, born on an Indigenous reserve in Saskatchewan, Canada, and raised by adoptive parents in the United States, is a pathfinder. The new film chronicles how she’s often had to wait for the stragglers to catch up to the trails she’s forged by composing genre-defying music, trying out cutting-edge musical technology, and advocating on behalf of Indigenous people. To paraphrase the Academy Award-winning song Ms. Sainte-Marie co-wrote for “An Officer and a Gentleman,” the documentary lifts her up where she belongs.

“They call her the First Lady of Indigenous music,” says Indigenous singer Leela Gilday in a Zoom call. In September, Ms. Gilday performed at “Starwalker,” a televised tribute concert to Ms. Sainte-Marie hosted by Canada’s National Arts Centre. “Music [has] been at the forefront of every revolution. It’s a powerful tool for impacting people’s hearts and minds and creating social change. And she’s well aware of that. So she has always used her music to fire those movements.” 

Ms. Sainte-Marie, a self-taught musician championed by Bob Dylan in the folk music scene of New York’s Greenwich Village, was crowned best new artist by Billboard magazine in 1964. The following year she wrote “Until It’s Time for You To Go,” which was subsequently covered by many artists including Elvis Presley, Neil Diamond, and Cher. But upon the release of “Illuminations,” a 1969 album featuring a primordial synthesizer that manipulated her vocals, she says, “the folkies held their noses and ran the other way.” She laughs without bitterness at the memory. 

The octogenarian’s most recent albums, “Power in the Blood” (2015) and “Medicine Songs” (2017), utilize electronic sounds to create chiaroscuro contrasts with the organic textures of powwow vocal chants. They include fresh recordings of old songs. She believes listeners are ready to reassess those lyrics in light of the findings of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Its 2015 report concluded that the country’s residential schools for Indigenous children enacted a form of “cultural genocide.” 

“In the early ’60s, I may have been very naive, but what I believed about ‘Now That the Buffalo’s Gone’ is that if only these nice people knew they would want to help,” she says. “In many cases they did want to help and they continued to learn, and many did help and showed up. Of course, a lot more didn’t. ... It wasn’t for another 50 years that Truth and Reconciliation brought forth the necessary background so that other people can understand it.”

When Ms. Sainte-Marie performs live, one stage prop she often uses is a red dress on a hanger. It represents missing and murdered Indigenous women. The songwriter says she doesn’t carry a grudge and doesn’t have an ax to grind. Her goal is to educate others about the history and heritage of Indigenous people – something she did as a regular guest on “Sesame Street” in the 1970s. More than that, Ms. Sainte-Marie is a proactive philanthropist.

“The nicest thing that’s ever happened to me hasn’t been my Academy Award, or even there’s this wonderful documentary that they made about me,” she reflects. “It really was when I found out ... that two of my earliest scholarship recipients went on to become the presidents and founders of tribal colleges. They started the tribal college movement.”

When the songwriter isn’t tending to the goats and chickens in the Hawaiian home that inspired her 2015 song “Farm in the Middle of Nowhere,” she’s stockpiling new songs. “I try to understand and interpret in art some of the hard things that just plain exist that we need to make better,” she says, adding that the tone of her work is often “soft.” 

She realizes that progress is a process that sometimes spans generations. “What I learned on five years of ‘Sesame Street’ was that there’s always a new crop of 5-year-olds,” she muses. “If you really understand that, you don’t give up hope.”