INTERLUDE

Buffy Sainte-Marie
on surviving abuse

I think that talent and our natural talents, our hunches, our intuitions, they’re really very important survival tools. We ignore them to our detriment; we’ve been so talked out of them, we’ve been disempowered. Not deliberately. I’m not talking about, “Ooh, the evils of colonialism. They want to tie our hands.” No, I’m talking about how our moms sent us to first grade and hid our crayons and wouldn’t let us play the piano anymore. Now that didn’t happen to me, but if it had, I wouldn’t be talking to you today. [Laughs] I would have died.

Buy your kids some toy drums, a little xylophone, a cheap ukulele to play with like toys. Buy your kids nice paper for their drawings, encourage them, buy them some nice little art supplies. Not so that you can make a product that will impress Auntie Sue or make a living but because it’s fun and because the kid gets to express herself and make something that she felt like making that day. Our whole lives are happening now. They’re not happening when you’re twenty-one and have to get a job, they’re happening now. We’re not taught to treasure the gifts of nature that we’re born with. Instead we squash them and we become bean counters and I think we smother our children’s talents. It’s the lucky ones who get to hang onto it because it’s nourishing for your whole life.