Buffy Sainte-Marie is out of this world

Chris Knight - National Post

There’s a great story about Canadian First Nations singer/songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie being accidentally quoted in a 2004 edition of the magazine Smithsonian. Lyrics to her famous anti-war song Universal Soldier had been found scratched on a cot in an old Vietnam War troopship, and mistakenly identified as free verse from an unknown soldier.


Buffy Sainte-Marie is the subject of a new documentary called Carry It On.

Scores of readers fired off angry letters to the august publication to say that it was in fact the work of Scottish pop legend Donovan. And then scores more had to weigh in even more angrily with the news that the haunting song had in fact been written and first recorded by Sainte-Marie on her debut album It’s My Way!, a year before Donovan’s admittedly better known cover.

Sainte-Marie isn’t angry about the misattribution. In fact, during a freewheeling Zoom call with the 81-year-old member of Saskatchewan’s Piapot Cree Nation, her overwhelming emotions are joy, wonder and curiosity.

Hearing that my unofficial second beat after movies is space travel, she launches into the story of how she went to the Kennedy Space Center in 2002 to perform in honour of John Herrington, the first Native American astronaut. She sang Starwalker, Moonshot and Up Where We Belong, the last co-written for the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman. It made her the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar. She’d have gladly spent our half-hour chat on matters astronomical.

Sainte-Marie is the subject of Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On, a new documentary from First Nations director Madison Thomas. The film has its world premiere Sept. 8 at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Brimming with celebrity interviews including Joni Mitchell, Taj Mahal and Robbie Robertson, Carry It On charts Sainte-Marie’s twisty road to success that included a spot on the TV western The Virginian in 1968 – she refused to perform unless all the other “Indians” were played by real First Nations performers – and several years on Sesame Street, where she not only taught young viewers about First Nations people, but helped normalize breastfeeding by doing it on the air with her infant son, in front of Big Bird no less.

But the bulk of her fame comes from her music, an eclectic mix that includes elements of folk, rock, country and more traditional First Nations styles. I ask if she has a name for it.

“I don’t,” she replies. “It just pops into my head. Because I like all kinds of music. I mean, I like Chinese music and Azerbaijani, you name it. And so whatever I hear, I try to reproduce it. But yeah, I write bluegrass and love songs and blues and raunchy stuff, everything.”

Saint-Marie says she listened to everything from Elvis to Tchaikovsky while growing up, though she notes that in Massachusetts (she was abandoned and then adopted as a baby), “it was almost impossible to hear Indigenous music of any kind. However, Kaw-liga the Wooden Indian was real popular. Ugh.” The 1952 country song by Hank Williams has not aged well.

With degrees in teaching and what was then called Oriental philosophy – basically world religions – from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Sainte-Marie planned to become a philosophy professor, and probably would have been among the coolest ones ever in that profession. Instead, she tried her hand at performing in New York’s Greenwich Village, where she quickly found fame (and sold the rights to Universal Soldier to Donovan for $1).


Sainte-Marie in concert. She’ll be performing at the Toronto festival.© TIFF

Sainte-Marie will be performing live on the first night of the Toronto festival on an outdoor stage a block from the TIFF Bell Lightbox. As an entertainer and an activist, she tries to balance her concerts with a mix of messages.

“Somebody might come to hear Until It’s Time For You To Go but they don’t want to listen to that Universal Soldier crap,” she says, tongue in cheek. “Somebody else will come to hear only Indigenous stuff and they think that love songs are kind of a waste of the moment. So for me, because I like it all, I get to choose.”

She continues: “I’m totally aware of the power of a song. And I’m really aware of the diversity in my catalogue. So when I do a live show, I try to guide the audience into hearing the tougher emotional content. I’m not trying to punish them or scold them. I’m trying to inform them, and I wouldn’t ever leave them in that position of heartbreak. So it’s very deliberate that I’d follow a hard-hitting song with something genuinely positive, because I really believe in stability, and helping people to know without having to hurt them.”

Sainte-Marie has some powerful, hard-hitting songs that include Now That the Buffalo’s Gone, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying. She sings about genocide in that last song, written in the 1960s, and I was surprised to find clips of her talking about the 15th-century Doctrine of Discovery many years before it became part of the conversation in Canada during the recent visit by the Pope.

“I really like Pope Francis, I think he’s just wonderful,” she says. “And I think he could do something really, really important. The Catholic Church feels as though they have already abandoned the Doctrine of Discovery. And they have apologized. But the next step that only he could do would be to go to the United Nations and encourage the nations of the world to give it up. Because it’s still hurting Indigenous people all over the world.”

My time is up, but Saint-Marie wants to tell me something else. After her gig at the Toronto festival she’s off to St. Catharines on Sept. 10 for a concert, and then to the National Arts Centre in Ottawa on Sept. 16 for a celebration of her music, with performances by numerous musicians. “It’s like a tribute show,” she says. “And [astronaut] Roberta Bondar is going to introduce the song Moonshot! Nobody else will care, but you’ll get it.”

Time to let the legend go and get ready. She’s got a lot of singing, entertaining and educating to do.

Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On has its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 8, with additional screenings Sept. 9 and Sept. 17, and a wider theatrical release later in the year. Saint-Marie will perform on the Slaight Music Stage at the festival at 7 p.m. on Sept. 8.