Buffy Sainte-Marie, though not a household name like many other protest singer-songwriters of the American folk music revival (1940s-1960s), has written some of the most powerful protest songs of her generation. Although songs such as “All My Trials” by Joan Baez, “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob Dylan, and “If I Had a Hammer” by Peter, Paul and Mary are much more well known than those of Sainte-Marie, what sets her apart from those stars is that her music stems from personal experience of oppression.
Sainte-Marie was born in the winter of 1941 on a Cree Native American reserve in Canada. At the time, what we would now call “white saviors” were invading the Canadian reserves to convince (trick) Native American parents into giving up their newborns. Although they believed that they were doing what was best for the children by sending them to white families in Canada and the United States, Sainte-Marie exposes that it robbed her and others of their culture and contributed to further destruction of the Native American populations.
Growing up in Massachusetts, Sainte-Marie was aware that she was different from her white family and schoolmates, but it wasn’t until she met by chance a Native American man in the neighboring town that she became aware of the culture which was robbed from her. This, on top of abuse she sustained as a child, contributed to her drive to write powerful songs exposing the invisible destruction of Native American populations occurring in the United States, ignored by the general population.
After graduating with a double degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Sainte-Marie released her first album It’s My Way! (1965) 10 of 13 songs are original, but in the era of folk music one would not be able to tell the difference between Sainte-Marie’s lyrics and century-old ballads. Her word choice is spectacularly powerful, standing out on songs such as Now That the Buffalo’s Gone:
But even when Germany fell to your hands
Consider dear lady, consider dear man
You left them their pride and you left them your land
And what have you done to these ones?
Sainte-Marie’s creative process stems from her personal experience and trauma as a Native American, as someone who has experienced trauma, and as an addict. She takes these experiences and transforms them into powerful songs as a sort of warning, or to raise great awareness in listeners. Sainte-Marie would be described as having a creative personality by the definition of Csikszentmihalyi, as she clearly internalized the creative process by intertwining it with her own traumas and pain, as well as her great ability to adapt. Sainte-Marie’s ability to adapt is cemented by her being unable to read a single note of music after she has written it, which she considers a form of dyslexia. Since the age of three, Sainte-Marie has written songs by ear, transcribed them for others to play, and then played solely from memory.
In Gehry’s definition of creative pillars, Sainte-Marie’s relation between child and adult creator is most significant. Sainte-Marie reaches back to the confusion she felt about her true identity as a child when writing songs. She gives warnings to her past self, on topics such as love (He Lived Alone in Town) and Drug addiction in the wrenching Cod’ine [codeine]:
Stay away from the cities, stay away from the town
Stay away from the man pushing the codeine around
Stay away from the stores where the remedy’s fine
For better your pain than be caught on cod’ine.
In this song and many others Sainte-Marie uses a simple modal tuning, which means that the chords tend to fall somewhere in between major and minor, only contributing to the power of the song.
Sainte-Marie has won an academy award for her music, earned honorary PhDs, and even appeared on Sesame Street breastfeeding and playing the mouthbow, a type of instrument used by indigenous populations worldwide.
If you have the time and are interested, check out these videos!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXkM11kp_tg
Rainbow Quest: Buffy Sainte-Marie - My Country Tis of Thy ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v7LlS5Ajs4
Sources:
https://www.vogue.com/article/buffy-sainte-marie
https://trnto.com/too-close-to-call-this-towns-merriest-misers/
Thanks so much for shining some light on Buffy Sainte-Marie! I had personally never heard of her, and, from just this short introduction, she really strikes me as both an interesting creative as well as just an amazing woman. Sainte-Marie seems to epitomize the sense of identity crisis, indignation, and pure grief that many Native American children experienced as result of the “kill the Indian, save the man” white mentality of her time. You can almost see (and hear) her reaching back to the trauma of her childhood when she is performing; the emotion is so vivid.
ReplyDeleteI recently visited an Ojibwa museum in northern Michigan where they discussed the forcible removal of Great Lakes Native American children and their placement into government and religious boarding schools and white families. Although I had been aware of the inhumane methods of assimilation (and arguably the inhumanity of wanting to assimilate them at all), I was greatly reminded of the scale of the project. As you mentioned, Sainte-Marie wrote songs to expose the implications of assimilation as well as wider Native American oppression: not only the destruction of a culture, but the destruction of a people. If the types of culture-robbing processes that Sainte-Marie faced were prevented, imagine how much richer a role Native American culture would play in the wider American identity, as opposed to it being seen as a separate entity.
You brought up many interesting elements of her creative process. Something that came to mind for me too was the influence of the both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. I think you can argue that these are coexisting. She is extrinsically motivated by wanting to expose the invisible destruction of Native American populations to the ignorant (or willingly oblivious) general population; she is intrinsically motivated by the need to express the emotional pain her situation has caused her, even as an adult.
I am definitely going to take some time to read her lyrics and listen to more of her music!