Buffy Sainte-Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie is a singer-songwriter, musician, composer, visual artist, educator, pacifist and social activist associated with contemporary folk, country, folk, folk pop, folk rock and psychedelic folk. She is from Stoneham, Canada, and is identified with Native American and Indigenous issues throughout her career. Her work often addresses the experiences of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, as well as themes of love, war, religion and mysticism.

Early life and education

Born Beverly Jean Santamaria in 1941, she is born at the New England Sanitarium and Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts, to Albert Santamaria and Winifred Irene Santamaria, whose family later changes its name to Sainte-Marie. She studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, earning degrees in teaching and Oriental philosophy, and graduates in the top ten of her class. She later earns a Ph.D. in Fine Art from the same university.

Career and activism

In 1964, while travelling to the Piapot Cree reserve in Canada for a powwow, she is welcomed and adopted in a Cree Nation context by Emile Piapot and his wife, the youngest son of Chief Piapot and his spouse. In 1997, she founds the Cradleboard Teaching Project, an educational curriculum intended to improve understanding of Native Americans. Her career includes both music and wider work in education and social activism, and she receives recognition and many awards and honours for these activities.

Personal life and beliefs

She marries surfing teacher Dewain Bugbee in 1968 and they divorce in 1971. In 1975, she marries Sheldon Wolfchild, with whom she has a son, Dakota "Cody" Starblanket Wolfchild; that marriage also ends in divorce. She later marries her co-writer Jack Nitzsche in 1982, and he dies in 2000. She lives in Hawaii. Although she is not a Bahá’í, she is an active friend of the Bahá’í Faith and appears at concerts, conferences and conventions connected with it, including the 1973 Third National Bahá’í Youth Conference and the 1992 event “Live Unity: The Sound of the World.” She also appears in the 1985 video Mona With The Children. She says she supports a universal sense of religion but does not subscribe to any one religion.

Later commentary

In interviews, she says she is blacklisted by American radio stations and that Native American and other Indigenous artists are put out of business during the 1970s. She also states that, in the 1980s, she learns President Lyndon B. Johnson had praised radio stations for suppressing her music. She describes this as part of a wider attack on protest and Native American movements in the United States.