WHEN BILLBOARD MAGAZINE named Sainte-Marie the best new artist of 1964, it was more than just a thrilling honor for an emerging musician.¹⁶ It was a disruption in the ecosystem of the mainstream music industry. It’s My Way! wasn’t a chart-topper nor was it a “conventional” folk record, but it was a powerful work made by a Cree woman who thoroughly and proudly centered Indigenous identity at its core, whose voice rattled the moon and the status quo, and who refused to capitulate to popular stereotypes and clichés of Indigeneity. With each record that followed, Sainte-Marie expanded her message, increasing awareness, and making the invisible visible.

There was little Indigenous representation in pop culture and the media in the mid-twentieth century aside from the stock characterization of “the noble savage,” and although a few Indigenous actors had careers—like Mohawk Canadian Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto in the Lone Ranger series on TV and in films until about 1960—non-Indigenous actors were usually cast to play Indigenous roles. (In the 1955 film The Far Horizons, for example, Donna Reed was cast as Sacagawea, the Lemhi Shoshone woman known for assisting the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In 2011, Time named The Far Horizons one of the top ten most historically misleading films.¹⁷)

But Sainte-Marie modeled a different Indigenous reality than that perpetuated by the entertainment industry. “When I say I’m a journalist, I don’t mean that I had stories coming out my pen: I mean, I had stories going in my eyes and ears for years that built to a body of interest,” Sainte-Marie says. “With ‘Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,’ I wanted people to know how important an issue it was, and I wanted them to understand it. The Seneca Reservation was flooded for a bunch of businessmen, and the oldest treaty in the congressional archives was broken. I wasn’t thinking about whether I was sharp or flat—it was what the song was about, and the emotion of it is just plain built-in because that’s just how I felt about the issue.”

The song had put Indigenous rights in the spotlight, and her position behind the mic had amplified her image as a potential leader in the growing peace movement. Other activists and leaders noticed her influence and respected the ways in which she approached the work: hands-on, effective, and all about the movements and the people, not her ego. Sargent Shriver, the husband of Eunice Kennedy, brother-in-law of President John F. Kennedy, and first director of the Peace Corps, founded an outreach program for poor and rural students called Outward Bound in 1965. Sainte-Marie was invited to Washington, D.C., to participate in the federally funded program. Through Outward Bound, she became more deeply enmeshed with the National Indian Youth Council. Sainte-Marie and other young Indigenous activists stood up to established energy corporations like the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil (which has profited enormously since the 1800s from convincing Indigenous people to sign away their lands) and demanded accountability from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which seemed to essentially legislate exploitation of the very people they were supposed to be looking after.

“The Bureau of Indian Affairs used to be the War Department; it was not set up as, ‘Oh, goody, now there’s an agency to help the Indians!’” Sainte-Marie says. “That’s what people thought on the East Coast where I was raised. ‘The Bureau of Indian Affairs looks after them. Isn’t that nice? And they don’t pay taxes.’ [Laughs] I don’t know where they got that Disney perspective, but that’s not the way it was. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was set up to solve the government’s problem, not our problem.”

She’s quite critical of “the racketeers,” as she calls the big business operatives, crooked politicians, and lawyers who exploit Indigenous communities—parts of the colonial systems that collude in predatory practices. But Sainte-Marie still operates from a place of empathy rather than rage or scorn. “When I wrote ‘Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,’ I wasn’t singing about Indians as victims so much as about the unknowledgeable colonials, the unwitting predators who support this corrupt system of contractors and politicians and ‘businessmen’ who pride themselves on perfecting the art of the deal.”

The life-broadening experience she got through Outward Bound and her meetings with like-minded young Indigenous activists couldn’t have come at a better time. “I was perfectly ripe for learning and for sharing,” Sainte-Marie says. “Working with people who came from a different facet of the same jewel—we were of the same stuff, but we were reflecting things from different angles. These were not like grassroots elders who hardly spoke English and who National Geographic would take a picture of; it wasn’t like that. No, these were vibrant college students who had had it up to here with colonialism. None of us called it ‘colonialism’ back then, and we didn’t know what to do about it on the big scale, but we were willing to confront it as we ran across it in our lives.”

Sainte-Marie confronted colonialism in her activism and with her music. On her 1965 album, Many a Mile, she covered several British traditional folk songs, but her originals were deeply rooted in her activism and core beliefs, including “Welcome, Welcome Emigrante” and “The Piney Wood Hills.” She didn’t always get the credit she deserved as a songwriter, but Sainte-Marie was accumulating professional power. She continued to use the spotlight to talk about Indigenous issues and alternative conflict resolution, but she also began to push her sound away from coffee-house acoustic. Her rapidly expanding sonic universe became more apparent on her third album, 1966’s Little Wheel Spin and Spin, which featured electric guitar by Bruce Langhorne and set the stage for further sampling across genres.

“You were supposed to stick to Pete Seeger and that kind of genre,” Sainte-Marie remembers, referencing the total acoustic devotion of the early folk scene and the fans who went apoplectic when Bob Dylan “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. “I thought it was stupid for everybody to go up in arms. I thought he was great! It just didn’t make sense to me. But that’s how audiences and the business are sometimes.”

Little Wheel featured her near-seven-minute epic, “My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying,” a devastating account of Indigenous reality in America that took down the stereotypes and clichés perpetrated by Hollywood, the government and racketeers, and the media. It also pointedly called out Canada’s residential school system, which, starting in 1884, made it mandatory for Indigenous children to attend and live at government-funded, church-run schools where the goal was assimilation and cultural eradication. The last residential school in Canada was closed in 1996. It’s estimated that more than 150,000 Indigenous children spanning multiple generations were ripped from their homes and communities and put into residential schools rife with systemic physical and sexual abuse, mental, emotional, and verbal abuse, hard labor, starvation, and medical experiments on the children. At least 6,000 Indigenous children are estimated to have died while in the care of the residential school system.¹⁸ Sainte-Marie’s song came approximately thirty years before the final school closed and decades before there was any public recognition of the real-life horrors inflicted on thousands of Indigenous children and their families over multiple generations.

“Now that the longhouses ‘breed superstition’/You force us to send our toddlers away/To your schools where they’re taught to despise their traditions/Forbid them their languages,” Sainte-Marie sings. Read as a poem, “My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying” is a scathing indictment of colonization and a lament at its cost.

For the blessings of civilization you brought us;

The lessons you’ve taught us;

The ruin you’ve wrought us;

Oh see what our trust in America got us.

My country ’tis of thy people you’re dying.

In Sainte-Marie’s original version, her vibrato resonates most deeply when exploring the in-between moments of rage and sadness, the space occupied by frustration, heartbreak, and hope.

“Oh what can I do?” say a powerless few.

With a lump in your throat and a tear in your eye:

Can’t you see how their poverty’s profiting you?

My country ’tis of thy people you’re dying.

As in many of Sainte-Marie’s songs, she asks the listener to bear witness. Her testimony becomes a light, an awakening, and the listener might at first dwell in the shame of complicity. But Sainte-Marie knows the futility of that guilt. Gentle but firm, her words are an education, not a lecture. “You don’t give it to people in an enema,” Sainte-Marie says. “If you really want to help make the world better, think like Jesus, think like Mohammed—that [level of] generosity. You don’t line white people up against the wall and humiliate them. That does nothing. It’s counterproductive.” One can’t talk just about white people’s complicity in colonization, Sainte-Marie says adamantly, without addressing their own victimization by the same forces. “White people have been exploited for far longer than Indians by colonialism, by the Inquisition, by the same people who came up with the Doctrine of Discovery,” Sainte-Marie says. “And I don’t ever let Native educators forget that: Before they ever came after us, look what they were doing to their own people. Look what they were doing to their own relatives. Do you understand what the Inquisition really was and how long it lasted? You probably think it lasted for three or four years? No, for eight hundred years they ran that thing, including on white people.”

Colonization was tantamount to genocide for Indigenous people throughout the world, “not because of race but because of greed,” Sainte-Marie says. European settlers wanted more—they felt they deserved it and that the land and people were theirs to exploit because they could. She points to the Doctrine of Discovery and its legacy of entitlement and violence that is still in practice today. Issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, the papal bull Inter Caetera, which was later known as the Doctrine of Discovery, became the central framework for the Spanish conquest of the New World, for all European claims in the Americas, and later for western expansion in the United States.¹⁹ It was a framework for explorers that states that all land uninhabited by Christians may be conquered and inhabited by Christians, and it exhorted explorers to overthrow the “barbarous nations.” The residual effects of this doctrine, Sainte-Marie says, are at the heart of systemic colonial inequality and inequity.

Sainte-Marie says that “‘My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying’ is, in a song, ‘Indian 101.’ I wanted to let audiences know how Indigenous people got to be in the state that they’re in today. I knew it wasn’t fair fights, majority odds, and superior weaponry. That’s bad enough, and that is what most people think. ‘Oh, you poor guys, you were outnumbered, and we had guns. I mean, it really wasn’t fair for you—poor you.’”

But it was more than that. Sainte-Marie felt compelled to address the legacy of European colonization all over the world—centuries of bullying and sexual violence. “I wasn’t hearing about residential schools on television,” Sainte-Marie says. “Television didn’t talk about it, ever. They didn’t teach about it in schools, not even in college. I found out about it through people who were actually there.” She quickly realized why there was a collective silence in the Indigenous community. “No one talked about it because they’d all gone to residential school, and if you’d gone to residential school, you’d probably been molested or raped. Everybody had. It was common and it was horrifying. In the 1960s, there was no audible sense of outrage, just shame and helplessness.”

According to Sainte-Marie, another taboo subject was how Europeans treated children, particularly the vulnerable children of the poor. “There was no sense of inequity within Indian country or the general public. It was just—this is what life is like. Which is also weird because the horror about residential schools was no secret. It was covered in newspapers as early as 1907, when Dr. Peter Bryce busted the scandalous mistreatment of First Nations kids.” The Bryce Report was an investigation by Dr. P. H. Bryce into the high mortality rate in Canadian residential schools. After his first report in 1907, the Victoria Daily Colonist ran a story with the headline “Indian Schools Deal Out Death” and quoted Dr. Bryce’s report, which declared, “We have created a situation so dangerous to health that I am often surprised that results were not more serious than they have been.”²⁰

As Sainte-Marie’s fame continued to grow and her profile increased, she often heard the same question from members of the press: “Why are you so angry?” Racist stereotypes of the “savage Indian” were (and continue to be) plentiful. In the mid-1960s, a female performer who presented as anything beyond the narrow categories of sweet virgin or sex kitten meant trouble. If she wasn’t deemed aggressive or hysterical, she was stereotyped as angry. A 1970 New York Times interview literally begins: “Buffy Sainte-Marie, the singer, is an angry woman.”²¹ In this case, the journalist leads with quotes from Sainte-Marie regarding the fashion industry’s appropriation and misrepresentation of Indigenous designs.

“It is most insensitive in the light of Indian poverty to be publicizing those clothes and giving awards to people who design them.” She grabbed a copy of a recent issue of Look magazine, which contained both a cover and several inside color pages of “Indian” fashions. “No Indian would wear those things,” she said. “And look—all of the models are white. Usually they have a few Black girls to portray Indians. They never use real Indians. You know, I’m really dismayed by all of the magazines and the fashion industry. They can’t be deaf, blind, and dumb.”

“I wasn’t ‘being an angry woman,’” Sainte-Marie says in retrospect. “I was pointing out an inequity!” But many journalists emphasized outrage over inequity, and in failing to interrogate the systems perpetuating those injustices, the media helped to erase her victories from the public record. “I don’t seem like somebody who’s going to be throwing rocks and spitting venom and pissing on people’s Shakespeare,” Sainte-Marie says. “I feel as though it’s a misperception, and in the long run, I guess I must not be doing my job properly.” Sainte-Marie has only ever wanted to be effective, empowering, and positive. Sure, she’s been angry, but she made a conscientious effort to approach her songwriting and her activism from a very different place, and so it can be disillusioning and exhausting to be repeatedly misinterpreted as simply angry. “In those days, there weren’t very many people writing [songs] about American Indian issues at all,” she says. “Peter Lafarge [‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes’] wrote a couple, but they were mostly written in anger. There was no sense of solution or compassion for the listener. I want the listener to get on board. I don’t want the listener to just get pissed and leave. I mean, I have had that happen, but it was not my intention.”

In the early days of Sainte-Marie’s fame, some audience members got riled up when she sang “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone” or “My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying.” “People asked for their money back,” she says. “I really offended some people just by being accurate! They were not ready to see that what I was saying was true. Which is another reason why I make it so crystal clear for short attention spans. If you read ‘Now That the Buffalo’s Gone’ or ‘Universal Soldier,’ or ‘My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying,’ it’s basically the facts. And every one of those facts can be fact-checked. I was writing the song as if it had footnotes. I thoroughly researched the song so it wasn’t coming from a place of hate, but many, many people who had never heard those facts or who’d never paid attention to them or who’d never seen them sewn up in a two-minute-forty-second bundle all at the same time were really—I don’t know if offended is the right word, but they questioned it. Because they’d never been exposed to it before, they thought I must be just sour-grapesing.”

The “angry Indian” stereotype is part of colonization; when marginalized or oppressed minorities speak up, those who hold power fear the disruption to the status quo that has benefitted them in visible and invisible ways. “Angry” is a way for power holders to dismiss and delegitimize activism and protest. But Sainte-Marie understands why people default to “angry” as a descriptor, even if she feels they’re wrong.

“I do think that people from ‘le showbiz,’ who are usually from the city and very often from second-generation immigrant families from Europe, are themselves angry,” Sainte-Marie says. “These journalists assume that I am too; they’re projecting their own anger. I think they’re saying, ‘Holy shit, we got fucked over, but Indians got fucked over even worse, and if I were an Indian, I would really be pissed.’ Like, pick up a gun or act in some ‘savage’ way. But in the history of Native American people, you haven’t seen this. And in my associations with Native American historians, scholars, professors, activists, schools, school kids, and community people over the last fifty years, I have not seen a lot of angry people. Determined, dedicated, depressed, disgruntled, disappointed, defeated, demoralized, and in despair—yes. But for Native American people, it was almost like being an abused child or wife: Anger would just make the bully more dangerous, so you were careful not to become a target. To me, this is not cowardice—it’s common-sense survival. I’m not saying there haven’t been or aren’t any angry Indigenous people; I just tend to spend my time with elders, women, kids, artists and musicians, highly educated Native lawyers, and seasoned activists who know how to survive the work in spite of emotion, and how to redirect adrenaline to a more effective use than just spewing anger. I don’t hang out with tough guys. I don’t pretend to be a warrior. I don’t throw snowballs and insults at people with guns. I tend to be patient. Maybe I lack testosterone, but I seldom feel angry. Some people will argue that I’m not angry enough . . . and they might have a point.”

As Sainte-Marie’s fame grew and her profile expanded internationally, she continued to take musical risks. On her 1967 album, Fire & Fleet & Candlelight, she recorded a few songs orchestrated by Peter Schickele (a.k.a. P. D. Q. Bach), who had worked with Judy Collins and Joan Baez. But she continued to raise the profile of Indigenous issues every time she got behind a microphone, and eventually Hollywood beckoned. In 1968, she was approached for a guest-starring role on the popular NBC western television series The Virginian, which aired from 1962 to 1971. Director Leo Penn, who had been blacklisted for his support of the Hollywood Ten²²—they refused to name names when called before the House Un-American Activities Committee—wanted Sainte-Marie for the role of an Indigenous woman who goes to school back east and then must decide if she wishes to return to her home. The singer-songwriter had two demands before she’d sign on: Actual Indigenous people had to play all the Indigenous roles, and the writers had to give her character more complexity, elevating her beyond that of the one-note, Hollywood cliché.

“I said, ‘No Indians, no Buffy.’ The reason I did that was not solely to ‘stick up for the Indians.’ It was also because any production is going to be better if the people involved are familiar with the cultural experiences in which it’s set,” Sainte-Marie says. “It was just common sense, you know. Sometimes in my life and in my career, I’ve had people look at something [I’ve done] and celebrate it, but for the wrong reasons. Well, not for my intended reason. The smaller point with The Virginian was that it was going to be an Indian show with an all-Indian cast. Wow, that’s a first! Yay, aren’t we terrific? But the bigger picture was that in any production, familiarity with the cultural group it depicts—why would you do it any other way?”

Sainte-Marie says her demands weren’t about railing against Hollywood’s racism problem; instead, she offered Penn and the producers and casting directors some alternatives to their default resources. And it worked. The show hired Indigenous actors from Jay Silverheels and Lois Red Elk’s Indian Actors Workshop to play all the Indigenous roles, thanks to Sainte-Marie’s insistence. “They had never thought of expanding their own network until I helped to make that possible,” Sainte-Marie explains. “My gripe was never against Hollywood for being racist, ’cause griping wouldn’t change that. I think it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. I think it’s better to turn these people on to where they can find Native American actors than it is to stand there, shaking my fist saying, ‘You bastards! You don’t let the Indians in!’ But that’s what a lot of people call protest. If instead you can do something that actually solves the problem, then wow, that’s actually being effective! That’s empowerment.”

The media brought the story to the public’s attention. The Los Angeles Times’ Hal Humphrey covered the historical moment for the paper in 1968, and called it an “unheard-of request” because in Hollywood real Indigenous people were never hired to play Indigenous people in westerns. Humphrey explained that the Screen Actors Guild had a “large assortment of Mexicans, Italians and mixtures who pass.” He then quoted Sainte-Marie: “They always used the excuse that real Indians can’t be found, but I have made it so they cannot say that anymore. Do you know there are 20,000 Indians in the Los Angeles area, representing 110 different tribes?”²³

Sainte-Marie also didn’t have anything to lose by making her demands because she didn’t actually care if she took the part. “It was much more important to me to pull off that kind of coup than to get my stupid face on a TV show,” she says. “As soon as I could provide accredited people, everybody was happy. It was definitely a win-win situation. It shouldn’t be looked at as though, ‘She won a fight.’ It wasn’t like that. No, I provided an alternative, which is different from winning a fight.”