Buffy Sainte-Marie played the Peterborough Summer Festival of Lights on June 24, 2009

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Buffy Sainte-Marie, CC (b. Beverly Sainte-Marie on 2/20/41) is an Indigenous Canadian-American (Piapot Cree Nation) singer-songwriter, musician, composer, visual artist, educator, pacifist, and social activist. While working in 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. Among her most popular songs are “Universal Soldier“, “Cod’ine”, “Until It’s Time for You to Go”, “Take My Hand for a While”, “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone”, and her versions of Mickey Newbury’s “Mister Can’t You See” and Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game”. Her songs have been recorded by many artists including Donovan, Joe Cocker, Jennifer Warnes, Janis Joplin, and Glen Campbell.

Early Life:
Buffy was born in 1941 on the Piapot 75 reserve in the Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, Canada, to Cree parents. At age two or three she was taken from her parents as part of the Sixties Scoop – a government policy where Indigenous children were taken from their families, communities and cultures for placement in non-First Nations families. She was adopted by an American couple, Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie, from Wakefield, Massachusetts. Though “visibly white”, her adoptive mother, Winifred, “self-identified as part Mi’kmaq.”

She attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst earning degrees in teaching and Oriental philosophy; she graduated as one of the top ten members of her class.

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.

Musical Beginnings:
Sainte-Marie taught herself to play piano and guitar 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” sung by the Indian singer Mohammed Rafi from the 1960 movie Barsaat Ki Raat) were already in her repertoire.

In her early twenties she toured 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. (She also introduced Mitchell to Elliot Roberts, who became Mitchell’s manager.)

There’s a lot more at wiki about Buffy.

Discography:
Albums: 17
Collaborations: 1
Singles: 13
Soundtrack appearances: 1
Compilation albums: 8

Honors and Awards: go to wiki and you’ll see the amazing list

Some things to share:
In 1983, she became the first Indigenous American person to win an Oscar, when her song “Up Where We Belong“, co-written for the film An Officer and a Gentleman, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 55th Academy Awards. The song also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song that same year.

In 1997, she founded the Cradleboard Teaching Project, an educational curriculum devoted to better understanding Native Americans.

Official website: here

BONUS VIDEO: