THE MID-1950s—when Buffy Sainte-Marie was in junior high and high school—were lonely times for her, and for a while, she wanted desperately to fit in. She often walked to school by herself. Mornings weren’t easy. “It was weird getting ready to go to school, putting up with my older brother’s bullying—he always picked on my looks—and trying to look okay like all the other teens,” Sainte-Marie says. “I tried to lighten my hair, piled on the usual makeup, but really, I just didn’t fit in. I had an occasional friend but had kind of given up on being part of the crowd. My interests weren’t the same as theirs. It didn’t occur to me that maybe I was smart and lucky to be [on the] outside, but now I think maybe I was.”

Within both the upper and lower classes there were pecking orders, she says, complete with social dramas that didn’t include her. She had attended grade school with the “snobby kids” when they were all little—“I found out a few years ago that the snob mothers didn’t like me much,” she says—but by her junior year, she was entirely on her own.

“I wasn’t equivalent to a goth or any other courageous high-school counterculture queen you might imagine,” Sainte-Marie admits. “I was defeated, limp, a nobody, non-existent except in my own head, probably clinically depressed, and invisible during high school hours.” But after school, it was like an entirely different world, and she particularly loved the winter season. “I’d drop my books at home, grab my skates, go down the hill to the lake, and skate until dark, hearing Tchaikovsky in my head . . . as well as Elvis, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee, LaVern Baker, and Chuck Berry. I don’t know if anybody else was skating to ‘Maybelline’ in their heads, but I was—it always felt right. Even though I was alone, I was happy.” Even when she got home late, she’d find her mother waiting for her. “It’d be dark by the time I skated to shore, chipped my frozen loafers out of the snow, and trudged up the hill to walk home, usually in the starlight. Sometimes I was so cold my mother would make me put my feet on a towel at the oven door. She was a great mom.” These happy memories stand out in sharp relief against the miseries of high school; Sainte-Marie was looking for escape wherever she could find it.

Around this time, she became known as “Buffy”—the nickname came from a high school friend, Pete Duston—and it stuck. She loved learning but found the classroom a limited place, and so she didn’t get great grades. And because she didn’t read music, she didn’t connect with structured offerings like the school band. She was content retreating into her own music.

Happy to have escaped piano lessons, Sainte-Marie was nonetheless a huge fan of classical composers, of both symphonies and opera. She liked the fact that many of the greats were also natural musicians, self-taught like herself. “You know who my first crush was? Tchaikovsky!” She laughs. It’s not every little kid growing up in the 1950s who falls hard for a long-dead Russian composer, but she wasn’t really a typical child. Coping with years of secret sexual abuse, she was also coming into her own sexuality, like every other teenage girl; the safest place in which to explore those emerging feelings was with a deceased, tortured genius who both inspired and stirred her.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was one of the greatest composers of the nineteenth century. He wrote the music for some of the most popular ballets of all time, including The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, which are still among Sainte-Marie’s favorites. He suffered greatly from depression, and she identified with his suffering. He also had a host of complicated relationships with women and men, and historians believe he was gay.² Tchaikovsky’s personal struggles can be heard in his compositions, rife with the beauty of escape, echoes of which found their way into some of Sainte-Marie’s own compositions. Thanks to the music in her head, Sainte-Marie, like Tchaikovsky, could be the architect of a more nuanced world than the one in which she lived. Tchaikovsky’s life offered a shadow-map for her, both creatively and romantically; her tender heart would gravitate towards difficult or broken men throughout much of her life. “I believed I was the one who could have saved him,” Sainte-Marie remembers. “And even now, when I go to ballet class, I’m still in it for the music.”

She taught herself to play guitar as a teenager. Without formal instruction, she tuned the strings uniquely for each song she made up, thinking that’s what she was supposed to do. She didn’t know it at the time, but her alternative tunings were more in keeping with the African-American gospel and blues artists of the 1920s and 1930s, rather than the classical Spanish tunings most mainstream guitarists used. When she discovered this, she dug into those artists more deeply, and it dovetailed perfectly with some of the other sounds that inspired her. Sainte-Marie loved blues, soul, rock, and early R&B, and like most teens at the time, she was obsessed with Elvis’s early records and with rockabilly. “When I was a teenager and he came along—I mean, that was it for me!” Sainte-Marie laughs. “It was over. I loved him, I just loved him. There was nobody like that in my town.”

Winifred urged her daughter to think seriously about college. No one on either side of Sainte-Marie’s family had ever gone to college. Her father, Albert (called Smokey by his friends), was a mechanic by trade and a hunter and fisherman in his spare time. Winifred (called Winnie by her friends) was a voracious reader and longed to travel. She was a proofreader and a copy editor for newspapers and publishing companies, positions she earned without formal training because she had no money for school. “Self-educated to the max,” Winnie’s love of learning became the through-line of her daughter’s life.

“She’s still one of the smartest people I’ve ever known,” Sainte-Marie says. “She put things together in a self-taught way. Although she never said so, I could read between the lines and learn that formal methods of doing things were not the only way.” That’s how Winnie approached everything from Indigenous history and identity to humanity and philosophy. Winnie encouraged her daughter’s interest in exploring anything and everything—music, philosophy, veterinary care, as well as her Indigenous identity, preparing her to go beyond the history books that skewed Eurocentric. Winnie also taught her daughter about the importance of giving back, and she was particularly interested in the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and in making the world a better place amidst overwhelming odds. “Even though my family did not belong to any organization or churches or anything like that, I did grow up with a big picture of the world, the troubles in the world, and that some people tried to make things better,” Sainte-Marie says. Winnie wanted her daughter to have every opportunity to learn, grow, and possibly change the world.

When it came time to apply to college, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst accepted Sainte-Marie’s application two weeks before the fall semester started. Winnie told her daughter that she could drop out and come home any time she wanted, and that lack of pressure made it easy for Sainte-Marie to give university studies a try. Sainte-Marie said goodbye to her family and entered college on a trial basis.

But Sainte-Marie loved UMass and everything it represented at the time. “In those days, as college freshmen, we were told that the reason you went to college or a liberal arts state university was because college was broadening,” Sainte-Marie recalls. “They don’t even use that word anymore. We were going to learn basics from which we were then going to build our lives. Now it’s just a meal ticket—you go to college to get a stamp of approval so you can go and work in somebody’s plantation, making money for them. That sounds like the army to me. But so many people have gone through college for a meal ticket, including in the creative arts, that today few people consider that there’s an intrinsic benefit to learning about a lot of things. An education in the field you really love grows your head. Just to bathe in expanding your knowledge base, learning stuff every day, is an incredible privilege, without thinking of turning it into a product for somebody to sell. The true motivation for art has been, I bet, the same since the caveman: it’s beautiful, it’s satisfying on a personal level, and because it’s personal, not everybody will get it.”

At university, she saw students from all over the world and real diversity. Sainte-Marie was no longer the only person of color in a tiny town. Some things stayed the same, of course, as she observed a collision of perspectives and encountered gendered expectations. “I was around a lot of girls who had gone to college because their parents said, ‘You go to college, you become a teacher, you catch a husband.’ I was around some girls who were not big thinkers at all,” Sainte-Marie recalls with a laugh. But she was also exposed to fellow students who were brimming with ideas around justice, civil rights, and the burgeoning protest movements. However, Sainte-Marie says, almost no one at the time talked about Indigenous issues.

Sainte-Marie started university during a pivotal time in America, particularly for civil rights. It was 1958, twenty years before the American Indian Religious Freedom Act would be passed on August 11, 1978. Hippies were still a few years away, but the beatniks had arrived in coffee houses with an emphasis on critical thinking and poetry, and a significant cultural shift was beginning. McCarthyism—Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign against American Communists or left-wing sympathizers, during which thousands lost jobs, some were imprisoned, and other Red Scare targets were driven to suicide—was in decline by 1956, but there was plenty of lingering anti-Communist sentiment and Red Scare rhetoric driving major decisions in the U.S. and internationally. There was already an American presence in Vietnam that would escalate dramatically in the mid-sixties. The first two years of the decade saw not only the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the construction of the Berlin Wall.

Ideological conflicts were just one aspect of the political and social climate. The African-American Civil Rights Movement was trying to end segregation and advocating for human and constitutional rights, freedoms, and equality for Black people. Public schools were desegregated in 1954, though segregation itself was not officially banned by the Civil Rights Act until 1964. Simultaneously, treatment of Native Americans was, arguably, getting worse; the years between 1953 and 1968 became known as the “termination era,” when 109 Indigenous bands and tribes were suddenly terminated and found themselves stripped of the right to govern their own people.³ The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 displaced Indigenous people from their lands into urban areas under the guise of integration and assimilation, though Indigenous people saw it as an attempt to control and exploit their natural resource–rich lands. It went as poorly, and cruelly, as it sounds, resulting in hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people being displaced from their reservations and communities over several decades. The “relocated” were promised jobs, housing, and training once they’d moved to urban centers, but the reality was vastly different. There were very few jobs or training opportunities, communities were broken up, and families were torn from their homes.⁴

Around 1961, Sainte-Marie traveled to Washington, D.C. She can’t quite recall the purpose of the trip, but it was there that she met members of a new group called the National Indian Youth Council, including Thelma Stiffarm and Walter Funmaker. The NIYC was composed primarily of Indigenous law students, and for Sainte-Marie, the group offered her the chance to meet people who were a lot like her: young, college-educated, politically charged, and ready to make a change. “I was hearing from individuals whose stories were somewhat similar to mine in that they had grown up in abuse,” Sainte-Marie says. “And in having to deny that the abuse even was abuse, since it was basically colonialism—you were gettin’ it from the church or the mayor or whoever’s biggest in the pecking order or something: ‘It’s obviously right and you’re wrong.’ So I was finding out that there was that, and I was finding out that they had problems in other communities too. Some of the people had grown up on the rez and others did not. Some of them, who’d grown up on one rez, were different than those who’d grown up on another rez. Some had been adopted out, and some had gone to residential schools.”

Her involvement in the NIYC also revealed the ways in which her reality as an Indigenous person differed from that of other Indigenous people. “All of a sudden, I was spending time with Indian people of my own age from all different backgrounds, and they had western accents,” Sainte-Marie laughs. “That was a first for me. I had never imagined that kind of ‘cowboys and Indians’ cowboy accent.” Her new friends were smart, progressive, and like-minded young people who had founded NIYC in 1961 after splitting from more conservative tribal leaders.

“They were becoming lawyers, they were becoming educated, they were becoming real activists,” Sainte-Marie says. “Not so much street activists but activists who were getting master’s degrees in law. They were really doing significant work that was very different from mine, but we connected.” Sainte-Marie traveled with NIYC co-founders Clyde Warrior and Mel Thom around Ponca City, Oklahoma. It was an eye-opening experience for the East Coast–raised college student. “There were signs in windows: ‘Help wanted, Indians need not apply,’ and it was kind of like a joke,” she remembers. “We went into a restaurant in a small town to get something to eat. The other people had real knives and forks, and they gave us picnic ware. We also saw a house, it was either for sale or for rent, and the sign said, ‘No Indians.’ You know, day after day, these signs were there. I had not seen that before I hung around with these people who were from intensely Native American backgrounds.”

When she returned to UMass, Sainte-Marie continued to explore Indigeneity but had to grapple with not only the horrifying historical effects of colonization, but also the present-day ramifications—and none of her non-Indigenous student peers seemed to know or care about the plight of Indigenous people. But her love of philosophy helped confirm her lifelong belief that there was a bigger picture, and UMass offered an entire discipline that invited her to think more deeply about the world, to imagine the unimaginable. “Studying philosophy and the way philosophers think was as intriguing to me as listening to somebody else’s music,” Sainte-Marie says. “But it was still me in the driver’s seat. That is, I was learning how other philosophers think, not learning how to think like them or because of them. It was a first-person identification with that part of the brain.”

Sainte-Marie adored the “bigger thinkers” from India, as well as most Asian philosophy, particularly the early writings and subsequent translations of the Tao Te Ching and the Upanishads. She declared her major in Oriental Philosophy and Religion with a minor in teaching. Because her major could not be completed only at UMass, she qualified for a cooperative program that UMass shared with Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Amherst colleges. This enabled her to take classes at two Seven Sisters colleges while enrolled at the more affordable UMass. She participated in studies in Buddhism and Hinduism at Smith, took Christianity seminars with Jesuits at Mount Holyoke, and did Bible Studies and Drama at Amherst College, which was a men’s school at the time. She held the Eastern philosophers in the highest esteem but wasn’t fond of Western philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Kant. She wasn’t interested in semantics and the implied “superiority” of Western philosophy. “That drives me crazy, the term ‘Western’ philosophy. It’s one of my pet peeves. As if it’s impolite and rude to say ‘white’ people. You can say Black people, you can say Indigenous people, but when you refer to white people, you say Westerners. I live in Hawai‘i. West of me is China. I used to live in California; west of me was Hawai‘i. ‘Westerners’ is so British—can we please say it’s obsolete and incorrect? Like the word ‘Indian’: we use it, but ugh. I’m much more bothered by the use of the word ‘Westerners’ as a code for white people.”

Still, at the start of her philosophy studies, she fell briefly in love with every Greek philosopher she came across. “Every one of them became my hero for a few weeks, and then I’d read the next one and I’d see what was wonderful about the way they thought, and then I’d be in love with that,” she says. “I guess I fell in love with thinking in its limitless manifestations.” Studying philosophy broadened both Sainte-Marie’s intellectual horizons and her understanding of her interior world. “I came to understand myself in a bigger way, and at the same time I was understanding the universe in a way that I had guessed at, as a child. The more I have experienced in my life, the more that [those experiences] confirmed much of my basic feelings from childhood.”

Studying philosophy and world religions reinforced her church-less spirituality as well as the connection she’d always felt between herself and something bigger: the earth, animals, ancestors, and life itself. She has always been in love with human potential, and she believes there’s something beyond this world, even if she doesn’t know what. Ultimately, it’s creativity itself that is holy to Sainte-Marie. “The Creator, creativity, the creation: it’s all perfectly natural,” she says. “Creativity is some kind of internal gift from the Creator, at least in my experience. We’re made in the image of the Creator: that’s our green light for creativity. We create our songs, our families, our countries. We are supposed to be discovering and developing new ideas all the time, I think, not dragging our feet and living in some ancient past.” And to her, almost everything is a creative act—dropping money in a busker’s hat, fundraising for somebody to go to college, spending some extra time with a dog or cat, or even offering someone a smile. “Creative compassion doesn’t have to be something huge and political like what Gandhi did,” she says. “I love what the Dalai Lama says: ‘You always have the best, most effective tool for peace with you, and that’s your smile.’”

Sainte-Marie considered these ideas as she honed her persuasive writing voice. During her time in college, Sainte-Marie met students from around the globe. It wasn’t exactly a Wizard of Oz shift from black-and-white to glorious Technicolor, but her studies and peers confirmed something she’d always suspected and hoped for: there was so much more to the world than what she’d known when she was growing up. Sainte-Marie was thrilled by her conversations with fellow students about art, philosophy, protest, activism, ethics, and morality; these were the kind of consciousness-expanding exchanges that could revolutionize the world. And it wasn’t just the students, but the teachers, too, who encouraged intellectual and creative engagement. “I was with these incredible professors from all over the world, and they were talking about things that were really almost not of this world, and I was just loving it.”

Sainte-Marie continued to write songs as well as term papers. It wasn’t easy for her to share her music widely at first. She believed in the messages of her songs, but it was hard to break the patterns of her young life and push herself out of solitude and into the spotlight.

“My parents weren’t social; my mom didn’t belong to any groups,” she says. “I had flunked Girl Scouts! I didn’t belong to any clubs. In college, several sororities rushed me, but I didn’t even go. I wanted to be by myself. I was coming out of childhood trauma. I didn’t like living very much. My music was so personal. I would play it for some people who would enjoy it, but it wasn’t like I was playing on a big stage, and it wasn’t like I was part of a band. The only way I had the courage to get out onstage at all was because I believed in the content of the songs. I was like a journalist reading the news.”

Sainte-Marie took a risk and stepped outside her solitude, playing her songs for the women in her UMass dorm, and with the encouragement of her house mother and college friends, began to perform in small local coffee houses before venturing to bigger city coffee houses and later, a bar in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1960, Sainte-Marie had no idea that she would become a professional singer. Rather, she was like many of her peers on campus: a student, a musician, and a writer. “A few students had guitars and some had even formed a little folk music club called the Pioneer Valley Folk Society,” she says. “It wasn’t unusual for students to hang out and share a song. I was doing that with Taj Mahal in the stairwells of the University of Massachusetts. He was a very hot musician even then, and the echo [in the stairwell] was fantastic. But there wasn’t any audience. It was real music, just for the love of playing the music.”

Famed American blues musician Henry Saint Clair Fredericks, who performs as Taj Mahal, was a year younger than Sainte-Marie. He was also self-taught, politically active, and took creative cues and inspiration from all over the world. Mahal remembers reading a newspaper and seeing a picture of “this engaging-looking young woman” who was named Beverly Sainte-Marie. The photo showed her playing at the local coffee house and identified her as a student at UMass. Mahal was intrigued, and when he enrolled at the university later that year, he set out to try and find her.

“It didn’t happen,” Mahal remembers with a laugh. But he made friends with a group of male students who hung out in the music room, playing for the women students. “One day, I was coming out of the music room and, what do you know, in comes Buffy with a big coat and a book bag and a guitar and God knows what all else,” Mahal says. “She was trying to make it upstairs, and [it was a] perfect opportunity for me to help out. She said, ‘Oh, you’re the guy I’ve been hearing about,’ or something, and I told her I had seen an article on her in a newspaper. She says, ‘You want to play?’ and I said, ‘Sure!’ I went and got my guitar and we sat down and we strummed whatever chord came to our minds, and it turned out we were perfectly in tune. It was the most amazing thing in the world.”

Mahal and Sainte-Marie have been friends ever since, and Sainte-Marie is also friends with his wife, Inshirah Mahal. Eventually the two families became neighbors in Hawai‘i where they both raised their children. Sainte-Marie’s son Cody and Mahal’s son, Ahmen Mahal, have been best friends since they were little and were even roommates in college, and Sainte-Marie says that Mahal’s daughters, Deva, Nani, and Zoe, are all unique, extraordinary, powerful singers. More than forty years later, the old friends recorded together for the first time when Mahal played piano on Sainte-Marie’s song, “I Bet My Heart on You,” for her 2008 record Running for the Drum.

Even though it was Sainte-Marie’s looks that originally caught Mahal’s eye, once they’d met and played together, he discovered that he loved the self-taught guitar tunings she used, which were evocative of the blues greats that inspired him. He was also knocked out when he heard her sing. “When she played music, you could get excited, you know, and she had this great, interesting voice, a beautiful, vast vibrato.”

Sainte-Marie’s wide-ranging, cross-cultural musical tastes in college were the reason her voice was so distinctive and interesting. (She knows that some people can’t stand to listen to her, and she’s fine with that.) She credits three main vocal influences that she’s pretty sure Joan Baez or Judy Collins would not have had—or if they did, it didn’t come through in their singing. “One was the music of India; nobody listened to that in the early sixties,” Sainte-Marie says. She was ahead of the curve, embracing Indian musical influences well before the Beatles headed there in 1968.”I was singing all these quarter tones and getting away with it because nobody was around to tell me not to. I never worked with a band, so I didn’t have that self-critic thing going on.”

Her other two influences were vocalists. French chanteuse Édith Piaf was a massive star in her own right, but her passionate vibrato didn’t really have a place in the North American folk scene. When the house mother of Sainte-Marie’s UMass dorm played her Piaf’s music in 1958, she felt a jolt go through her whole body. And when she discovered Carmen Amaya, around the same time, she experienced the same sense of electricity. “Carmen Amaya was a flamenco dancer who’s also the most outrageous singer you’ve ever heard in your entire life,” Sainte-Marie says. “She sings her guts out. The two of them sang with the kind of passion that I just inhaled like air. It was just totally natural for me to sing with passion, and again, nobody told me not to. If I’d been a flamenco performer or a chanteuse in Paris, maybe everybody would have understood. But it was quite unusual to sing with that kind of passion in the USA,” Sainte-Marie laughs. “I just let ’er rip.”

Sainte-Marie’s teenage love of rock and R&B hadn’t dissipated, however, and when she could, she’d make the trek by train to New York to attend DJ Alan Freed’s live rock ’n’ roll shows to watch performances by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, LaVern Baker, the Platters, and other great artists of their time. It was at one of Freed’s shows that she discovered Jo Ann Campbell, often the only solo woman on the bill. Sainte-Marie remembers being floored by the singer.

“Her clothes were like a southern belle’s—except, forget the hoop skirt and cross that with Las Vegas,” she says. “She used to wear these gowns with trains and sparkles and beautiful colors. I’d go on a train from Maine to New York—and that’d take all day—just to see my heroes who I’d heard on the radio, and all of a sudden here comes this woman who looked like every little girl wanted to look, you know—it was just a real surprise and a revelation. I’d be sitting in the audience, and to see someone wearing those clothes, someone I could identify with as a musician, and I’d never even heard of her? It affected me in a lot of ways. I saw that there weren’t many women [in the music industry]. I learned that visuals were part of a show. I didn’t think too much about it, but the music that I loved was so important to me. I inhaled it all. But in my town, I couldn’t tell anybody.”

At the time, Sainte-Marie kept her rock and R&B musical influences to herself. Not many people in Maine or Massachusetts were listening to musicians like Lottie Kimbrough or Bukka White, hugely influential blues artists who never got the name recognition they deserved. In the late 1960s, British artists like Eric Clapton and a host of American rock musicians would make it popular to reference Delta blues guitarists. But when Sainte-Marie began to toe the edge of the folk scene, she found that the music was a little vanilla. In the early 1960s, “Bob Dylan was not famous yet. Joan Baez was just getting to be well known. Pete Seeger was well known. But basically, we had just finished with the Highwaymen and the Four Freshmen, the preppy boys’ groups. Nobody even mentioned Fats Domino anymore. It was like, ‘That R&B stuff is yesterday; this is—ta-da—folk music!’ but it was mostly Euro-American folk music. I became aware that in music, there were all kinds of cliques.”

In her senior year of college, Sainte-Marie was teaching first grade in Greenfield, Massachusetts, as part of earning her teacher’s degree. It also marked the beginning, she says, of her rebellious streak. “I was very Goody Two-Shoes in college. I didn’t drink or throw paint all over the walls or any of those stupid things. But I did have a clandestine rabbit in my room!” She doesn’t fully remember how she ended up with the rabbit, but she kept it in the first-grade classroom with the kids during the week, and on the weekend, she’d sneak it into her college dorm room. She already loved animals, but what she didn’t anticipate was how much she would grow to love the kids. “It almost turned me off teaching because I missed the kids so much,” Sainte-Marie remembers. “When the year was out, I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh!’ I had never looked at teachers from that point of view. You learn to love the kids so much and then you miss them, and I never got to see any of them again.”

But Sainte-Marie’s other interests were also taking her away from teaching. Her musicianship and songwriting evolved as she played in public more frequently and honed her performing skills. She also immersed herself in Indigenous education and activism, and she was passionate about fueling her songs with the realities of Indigenous people, culture, and the consequences of colonization. She realized that teaching on a reservation would just be another way to have her hands tied since she’d be constrained by the parameters set by the Bureau of Indian Affairs school system, and she thought that she could do more for Indigenous people by operating outside the system. After graduation, she was able to spend more time playing on the college coffee-bar circuit as well and eventually, her music led her to Toronto’s burgeoning Yorkville folk scene to play shows there and explore the country.

“In the USA, I never learned very much about Canada,” she says. “It’s very hard to give Canadians a picture of how it was for American students or Americans in general. Canada was just ‘our neighbor to the north.’ And when you look at the map in an American school, you have this big United States and then you have this thing at the top of the page that makes Canada look like a little horizontal skinny country to the north. ‘What’s up there?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know, Canada. It’s up there by Montana or something? And they speak French.’ So it was really a loony tunes view of Canada.”

She played gigs and spent time at the new Friendship Centre on Spadina, which is now the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto. She didn’t know anyone; she’d just show up and hang out, talk to interesting people, and exchange thoughts and ideas, just like she did at school. Among Sainte-Marie’s new Toronto friends was Elizabeth Samson, who would go on to be a producer of the CBC program Our Native Land. She also met Wilfred Pelletier (sometimes spelled Peltier), a Wikwemikong-born philosopher, writer, and educator who, like Sainte-Marie, was interested in embracing Indigenous education as an alternative to the dominant colonial narrative.

Sainte-Marie told Samson and Pelletier that she had been born to an Indigenous family in Saskatchewan. Samson and Pelletier believed that she could be the daughter of their friend Emile Piapot, the grandson of Chief Piapot of the Piapot Reserve, and his wife Clara Starblanket, daughter of the famed Chief Star Blanket of the File Hills Reserve in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley. Emile and Clara had reportedly had a daughter taken from the reserve around the time Sainte-Marie was born. Sainte-Marie went to a powwow that Piapot was at in Ontario, and the two were introduced. They spoke at length, and he invited her to come to the Piapot Reserve. She accepted the invitation and flew in a few months later to meet Emile’s wife, Clara, and the rest of their large family. She stayed for several weeks and kept going back. She’d found another place to call home.

Around 1964, Sainte-Marie was officially adopted into the Piapot family, as is the cultural custom, and was given the Cree name Medicine Bird Singing. “But we never have known whether I’m a [biological] relative or not,” Sainte-Marie says. “I wrestled with that for a while.” It wasn’t until she was pregnant with her son in 1976 that she truly came to terms with her dual identities. “The conclusion that I finally came to is that I had been lucky to have two families,” she says. “I had a family that had raised me and another who have been my family for my entire adult life. In each of those families, I may or may not be a blood relative. I have never known, and sometimes it bothered me a lot. But finally I accepted that I was lucky: I’ve had two families whom I loved in various ways. With my first family, I had a lot of issues with the men who were bullies and pedophiles. And with my second family, there was nothing like that; they were always good to me. So I had issues as a child, and some of them had to do with race or identity, but most really had to do with love and the way people treat each other.”

She recalls how some media assumed that she went to a reserve, had an “epiphany,” and became an activist for Indigenous people, but that wasn’t the case. “My activism had been building over the years, through my mom, through my own interests, through chance things that would happen,” she says. “It wasn’t an all-of-a-sudden change; it’s been with me since I was a kid. It’s the kind of things that I’d been talking about with Leonard Bayrd. I knew that reservations existed—and I knew that the colonial rap was a crock. Nobody was ever, ever, ever giving me activism lessons. There was no such thing; it just didn’t exist.”

Sainte-Marie now recognizes that her natural inclination to learn about her identity and challenge the stereotypes and perceptions of Indigenous people was a form of activism, but it was never confrontational. She calls it “if only you knew” activism, which means never shaming the listener but rather offering up information and alternatives. As her songwriting style emerged, this “if only you knew” activism coalesced with her love of philosophy, at least when it came to protest songs. “Because I’ve never come from anger, I think my message has been clearer,” Sainte-Marie says. “Protest songs have to be more than just emotional, ‘angry’ Indian songs or angry anti-war songs—they’re not effective. It’s okay to do that, but anger itself is not necessarily effective in making change, which is what I really wanted to do.”