IN THE EARLY 1970s, Sainte-Marie was working with well-known collaborators and enjoying a spike in popularity overseas thanks to the success of her song, “Soldier Blue.” She was also on the road constantly—but no matter where she was, she never stopped advocating for the rights of Indigenous people. She believed that if only everyone else understood the inequity they faced, they would want to help. Hope is integral to her resistance, and her resistance is equally paramount to her hope. Everything she’d instinctively cultivated in childhood and youth—her sense of humor, imagination, music, and love of nature—was part of a survival strategy that allowed her to thrive. In the early 1960s, she’d gained a deeper understanding of that innate resistance after spending time with her family on the Piapot Reserve, meeting and connecting with young Indigenous activists in the National Indian Youth Council, and traveling as often as she could to other reservations in North America. She made some life-changing friendships and forged relationships within the activist community.

In the late sixties, Sainte-Marie met Annie Mae Pictou Aquash, a fellow activist whom she liked right away. Sainte-Marie can’t remember exactly where they met—“Cities start to look alike when you’re traveling around with a guitar,” she says—and even though Aquash was a few years younger than her, they bonded quickly. Like Sainte-Marie, Aquash was originally from Canada (she hailed from Nova Scotia). When they met, she was living in Boston, 130 miles from where Sainte-Marie had gone to school. Aquash was also Mi’kmaq, like Sainte-Marie’s adoptive mother, Winnie. Sainte-Marie was encouraged by Aquash’s work with the Boston Indian Council. “Twenty years before, most people in Boston didn’t know that there were any Indians,” she says. “They just plain had never come across it; it had never crossed their screen. But Annie Mae knew, and she was involved with some other ‘invisible Indians’ in Canada and Boston.”

Through their activism with various groups, including the National Indian Youth Council and the Boston Indian Council, Sainte-Marie and Aquash also knew the activists leading the American Indian Movement (AIM), an Indigenous civil rights group founded in 1968 by several young activists, including Dennis Banks and Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt. Russell Means, who had a strong leadership role, became AIM’s national director in 1970. They were resisting racist U.S. government policies and policing, protesting broken treaties, and advocating for Indigenous sovereignty as well as land claims and resource rights. Both strip mining and uranium extraction were behind treaty violations and had severe consequences—pollution, exploitation, displacement, environmental and financial ruin, cancer, and even death—for Indigenous people.

Sainte-Marie saw something truly empowering about these early days. “In my heart, and in the hearts of others, there was a real resistance,” she says. “There was a genuine grassroots movement, and I was fortunate to be a part of it and learn from it and sometimes help it along by spotlighting an issue.”

From the New York Times to the Washington Post to the Chicago Tribune, the young Indigenous activists were continuously framed in the media as “radicals” and “militants” who challenged the status quo, which, in turn, was fiercely enforced and upheld by rich settlers, who often identified themselves as “patriots,” but whose notions of morality and propriety were shaped by capitalism and exploitation. Government and big business had vested interests in silencing Indigenous activists, and even when it wasn’t done overtly, they had other, more subtle methods of oppression.

“They owned it all,” Sainte-Marie says. “They didn’t hire us outspoken artists at their universities and theaters or support entrepreneurs who may have needed their support, their ads, their permits to put on a concert or a speaking event. I may have been famous, but I wasn’t playing in the heart of Indian country, and that was a great shame. If we’d understood at the time, we might have had a stronger impact where it was most needed. If there’s one thing that I could have done differently, I would have had a real business shark in my corner who also understood the stakes and potentials in Indian country, but there was no such a person in my corner. And even had there been, who knows? It was probably just impossible at the time. We were obviously marginalized citizens out-powered by huge energy companies, and our voices were not to be heard by the public. So they weren’t.”

Early on in her career, Sainte-Marie could book shows in major cities like Toronto, Miami, New York, and Los Angeles, but she was never invited to Oklahoma City, Phoenix, or Wyoming, or other places that make up what she calls “Indian country.” Sainte-Marie and the Santee Sioux activist-poet John Trudell later discussed their suspicions that big energy companies like Standard Oil, Peabody Coal, and their ilk not only quietly blocked activist shows in “Indian country,” but they also ensured that major newspaper stories about Sainte-Marie and other positive Indigenous activists weren’t picked up by editors of the local papers. Sainte-Marie traveled both coasts via coffee houses, colleges, and Indigenous friendship centers, but was conspicuously absent (in hindsight) in places like North and South Dakota, Oklahoma, or Nebraska. It wasn’t a confrontational persecution of her, Sainte-Marie says, but rather a negation of anything that corporate entrepreneurs—motivated by profit, competition, and bullying—saw as bad for their bottom line.

But they persevered. “John Trudell was getting out of the army at the time, but he was becoming an activist, and we wrote letters back and forth. Dennis Banks, Russell Means, Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt, and Eddie Benton Banai, the people who founded AIM, had recently gotten out of jail and were beginning to advise local people about their rights. All of us were emerging from having had our hands tied, sometimes totally unfairly, unjustly, by a system that we all wanted to change.”

Some of the people on the National Indian Youth Council had earned law degrees that they used to confront the executives, the system, and local issues. Others organized, as AIM did in Minneapolis-St. Paul and the Native American Committee did in Chicago and Annie Mae Aquash had done with the Boston Indian Council. Sainte-Marie was doing it nationally and then internationally through music and education and eventually through philanthropy. “I had traveled enough in Indian country to know what one fixable problem was,” Sainte-Marie says. “Maybe somebody else would have diagnosed a different problem. But I saw that there were a lot of Native American people who, after they finished high school, were about to work for some energy company, and carry uranium in and out of the mine.”

With her own money, Sainte-Marie started the Nihewan Foundation for American Indian Education in 1969, which for the next fifty years awarded financial scholarships to Indigenous people who wanted to continue their education beyond high school. “Students just didn’t know how to negotiate the path between high school and getting to college,” Sainte-Marie says. “Meanwhile, many scholarships from big foundations were available but went unused. The Nihewan Foundation was different because it required and helped students to apply for other support as well.” Sainte-Marie’s hope was that it would empower future Indigenous leaders and scholars who otherwise might not have considered college or post-graduate education possible, particularly those who saw no life for themselves other than working for the energy companies that had swooped in to extract resources and exploit their land with assistance from the U.S. government.

The same year Sainte-Marie launched her foundation, a group calling themselves Indians of All Tribes began their occupation of Alcatraz Island, the site of the infamous prison near San Francisco that had been closed in 1963. Her friend John Trudell was right out in front. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie between the U.S. and several Indigenous nations had guaranteed that any abandoned or out-of-use federal land would be returned to the Indigenous people who had once occupied it. Alcatraz fit the bill, but the government refused to negotiate. As the occupation began to receive media attention, thanks in part to high-profile visits from celebrity allies like Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando, the government attempted to control the situation, frequently cutting off electricity to the island as well as telephone service. Access to clean, fresh water was almost impossible, so Sainte-Marie offered financial support to provide clean water to the Indigenous occupiers, including Trudell, who was on-site with his family. According to one interview in 1970, Sainte-Marie donated $300 a month to get clean water to Alcatraz, but it still wasn’t enough.³⁰ The government also made deliveries difficult, so food and other necessities remained scarce.

Sainte-Marie performed at a benefit for the Alcatraz occupation on December 12, 1969, in Stanford University’s Memorial Chapel. It was broadcast on KPFA public radio’s open hour the same night. Tapes from the evening are archived with Pacifica Radio Archives, which also holds thirty-nine tapes from Radio Free Alcatraz, a show hosted by Trudell and designed to “give a voice to the voiceless minority of Native Americans.”³¹ On December 22, 1969, KPFA began its first live broadcast from Alcatraz, under Trudell’s direction. Each episode began with a recording of Buffy Sainte-Marie singing “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone.” Trudell’s final broadcast was in September 1970, but the occupation continued until June 1971 when the U.S. government forcibly removed all of the remaining activists from the island.

In the early 1970s, Sainte-Marie signed with a booking agency in Los Angeles, and around the same time, Aquash arrived in L.A. from Boston. She reached out to Sainte-Marie and also let her know that she was looking for work. Sainte-Marie introduced her to her publicist, Karen Shearer, who needed an assistant. Aquash helped Shearer facilitate some of Sainte-Marie’s personal appearances, including a project with the award-winning actor and then activist (now conservative Republican) Jon Voight. Having Aquash as a part of the team during that time made Sainte-Marie feel less alone and less othered on the road. “If I had a personal appearance, I would usually be working for white people in exclusively white show business,” she says. “And this would bother me. I would say, ‘Where are the Indians?’ Night after night, singing to only white faces—ask Jimi Hendrix how that felt,” she laughs. “You’re not rejecting the fact that there are white people there, but you’re wondering, where’s everyone else?”

Aquash also helped Sainte-Marie expand the agency’s perspective to recognize the value of reaching out and targeting a broader audience and in making sure that Indigenous people were included rather than forgotten or excluded. “Annie Mae and I knew this [Indigenous] world, but almost nobody in L.A. show business did. I was glad to have her injecting some perspective into how to bring Native American people together to support the initiatives we championed, and how to bring national and local efforts together. You have to understand the bonehead mentality of otherwise brilliant publicity folks when it comes to Indians. They know the alcoholic stereotype and they know the romanticized savage Tarzan stereotype, but they have little real-world experience to draw upon regarding Indian realities, so they come up empty.”

Aquash eventually began to work more closely with AIM. Sainte-Marie remembers that Aquash worked with fellow AIM activist Leonard Peltier but neither was particularly prominent compared with the two men whose names constantly appeared in the paper, Dennis Banks and Russell Means. “Dennis and Russell were very colorful, very powerful speakers, although very different from one another,” Sainte-Marie says. “They really made sense, especially to ‘the boys’ in media and ‘the boys’ in politics. Marlon Brando didn’t spend a whole lot of time talking to me or Annie Mae or to Mary Crow Dog. Marlon Brando spent time talking to the boys about guy things on a guy’s level in that rough and tumble way of camaraderie, that locker-room kind of talk. Marlon and the guys from AIM were all on the same page. I’d just leave at a certain point.”

In the earliest days of AIM, sexism and misogyny were rampant, despite the burgeoning feminist movement. Sainte-Marie can name it, as she could then, but she contextualizes it within the time period. “Those guys were just getting out of jail, and although they were doing great work in informing urban Indians of their civil rights, they also loved having teenage girls just in from the reservation looking up into their big brown eyes,” she says. “I felt they were exploitative from the start.”

Grassroots or city, Sainte-Marie was tired of being surrounded by groups of men, so she was particularly grateful for the women who occupied her various worlds, among them Aquash, Crow Dog, and Joni Mitchell. Most men at the time, whether they were bands, record executives, or activists, were obsessed with two things: having control of the microphone and what she calls “GP.”

“What’s ‘GP’? Getting pussy. I got so tired of the conversation always coming back to getting pussy—same like it was back in the elevator with Jack [Nitzsche] and the recording boys—and especially in showbiz biographies I’ve been reading lately. I find it boring, even though I like women a lot,” Sainte-Marie laughs, but there’s an edge in her voice. “No, I do. However, the only times I ever said anything to my 1970s men friends was in a kind of hesitant, little, ridiculing tone, but it was also full of hurt, resentment, and ‘How dare you?’ And ‘Boy, are you AIM guys ever missing it,’ I thought. At the time, they were not smart or experienced enough to listen to women, including me. And they were surrounded by wonderful women. The women who were supporting them—their mothers, wives, girlfriends, sisters, and aunties—they were just wonderful. But you didn’t hear about them . . . Nobody ever gave us the microphone. Later, grassroots women finally—without hurting any of the men—just stepped forward and blew through the rudeness and the misogyny that we had all experienced, and did whatever we could.”

By 1973, Sainte-Marie and Aquash’s lives had diverged. Sainte-Marie was on the road, and Aquash was more deeply involved in AIM’s on-the-ground activism. “She became quite crucial to the American Indian Movement,” Sainte-Marie says. “She was part of the inner circle who were doing things that I would hear about only after they were either set up or had happened. At this point, I was [traveling] all over the world—Hong Kong, Nashville, Europe, Australia.”

While Sainte-Marie was on the road in 1973, tensions began to escalate on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Approximately two hundred AIM members and Oglala Lakota occupied the infamous site of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, a location chosen deliberately for occupation.³² Less than a century before, American soldiers killed an estimated three hundred Lakota, including women and children, near Wounded Knee Creek. For the activists, reclaiming the site wouldn’t just be symbolic, it would be historic. Their occupation was meant to protest the failed impeachment of Oglala Sioux tribal chairman Richard “Dick” Wilson, who was accused of widespread corruption and politically motivated violence. Protesters were also critical of the U.S. government for failing to uphold its treaties with Indigenous people.

On the same day that the occupation began, U.S. law enforcement, including marshals and FBI agents, surrounded the town, set up roadblocks, and began to arrest people who attempted to leave. It turned into an armed standoff that lasted seventy-one days. In what became known as the Wounded Knee Incident, gunfire was exchanged at different times throughout the occupation, two Indigenous activists were killed, and one U.S. marshal was shot and paralyzed.

Sainte-Marie personally experienced a frightening act of protester violence in 1974, when she and Aquash were briefly reunited in Gresham, Wisconsin, to support the Menominee occupation of an abandoned Catholic abbey at the invitation of activist Ada Deer. The day after the two women arrived in Gresham, the conflict escalated. “The National Guard saved our butts,” Sainte-Marie remembers. “Annie Mae and I were ducking bullets, and the National Guard helped us to not get killed when those vigilantes began attacking Indian people. So I’m not unwilling to admit that people who sometimes seem like the opposition also sometimes seem like friends.”

By 1975, Sainte-Marie was still closely involved with Indigenous rights issues and she showed up to do the work, but she didn’t work with AIM on a day-to-day basis. She spent much of her time on the road and in support of a variety of different Indigenous activist groups. It wasn’t the gunfire that made her hold AIM at arm’s length, but rather her awareness of her role in the eyes of some AIM leaders. Occasionally it was her celebrity that proved most attractive to those in leadership positions, rather than her input, intellect, or power as a leader in her own right. “I might show up and bring the press with me to some big deal, but those boys were not about to hand over the microphone to me.”

She remembers one incident when she was in Santa Fe with her friend, Navajo artist and anthropologist Rain Parrish. They were alone in the nearby Tesuque Hills doing a fabric and jewels ceremony, and when they came down, Parrish received a call from a friend who was attending an AIM event. When she heard that Parrish was with Sainte-Marie, she asked, “How can you be with Buffy? Buffy’s here. She’s going to be at the AIM thing tomorrow.” The friend had seen posters that announced Sainte-Marie’s presence at the event, and hundreds of people expected her to be there.

“Some of the activist guys would use my name, get a thousand people in the room, and then say I was a no-show, which I never was, ever, not even one time,” Sainte-Marie says. “I never said that I would show up to something and didn’t. This time, I actually got on a plane and went to confront Russell Means in the parking lot. He didn’t do it again.”

In 1975, Sainte-Marie was also falling for a fellow activist. At an AIM rally in L.A., she met Sheldon Peters, the brother of her friend Ernie Peters. “Ernie was Dakota from Minnesota, and he was part of the American Indian Movement,” she says. “Very soft spoken, quiet, a thinker, a traditional kind of guy. He wasn’t like a headline grabber or anything like that. I met his brother, Sheldon Peters, and we became a couple. That’s what was going on before I wrote ‘Starwalker.’ I was spending time with not only the Piapots and other [Indigenous] people in Canada but also in different movement situations in the U.S.”

Sainte-Marie began to write “Starwalker” in 1975 as a way to acknowledge Indigenous leadership in and out of the spotlight. To this day, it’s still her favorite song, in part because of how personal it is. “I was thinking of all the people in the movement that I really admired and I wrote the song for them, not for any one person,” she says. “There are some real names in [the song], but Starwalker is not one person. Starwalker is my own personal Indigenous hero or heroine, like a Jay Silverheels or, today, a Sylvia McAdam kind of person. Sober—not somebody who goes out and gets drunk and ruins things. A real hero or heroine. A ‘star walker don’t drink no wine.’ That’s a very deliberate line, and I think it’s one of the reasons why the song continues to be a favorite of mine because I have always feared the destructive part of alcohol. I know people can have fun on it and all that, but the downside of it is so terribly destructive. I’ve always felt it’s a huge blessing in my life that I never went down that road. So many loved ones I’ve seen go through horrifying lives because of alcohol.”

Sainte-Marie says that the “Wolf Rider” character in the second verse is more specific: female, strong, someone who creates connections and opens doors. It might be a certain part of herself, she says, or someone like Annie Mae Aquash or activist and scholar Winona LaDuke or the women who founded and continue Idle No More. “‘You’ve seen her opening doors,’” Sainte-Marie says, quoting one of the lines in “Starwalker.” “There were a lot of people in the American Indian Movement days who opened doors too.”

The character of “Holy Light” was a real person—Ernie and Sheldon Peters’s grandfather—and this verse also marked the song’s musically groundbreaking moment: a sample of traditional singing. “Nobody was using samples at the time, and certainly not Native American samples,” Sainte-Marie says. “Indigenous music was not being heard at all. You could go to the Smithsonian and borrow a 78 or listen to Indigenous music on Ampex tape . . . but it was very, very hard to find Indigenous music at all in the seventies unless you were home on the rez. The music business hadn’t discovered sampling yet, and they sure didn’t care about Native American music. I used a little bit of sampling, but I also used some live singers when I recorded ‘Starwalker’ for the first time. When I re-recorded it on Coincidence and Likely Stories [in 1992], I overdubbed my own powwow vocals six times in different voices and added new sampling.”

“Starwalker” also contained a warning or, at the very least, some pointed advice from Sainte-Marie to her fellow resisters. “When it says, ‘Sisters, Brothers all together aim straight/stand tall,’ I’m not talking about pick up a gun and aim it at a camera to get your picture in the paper,” Sainte-Marie says. “‘Aim straight,’ really means, ‘American Indian Movement, stay clean, don’t get caught up in the rackets or any of the pitfalls that are out there when you’re attracting attention.’ It’s so easy to go right when you should go left.”

Unfortunately, there was more violence and tragedy ahead for the American Indian Movement. In June of 1975, Joseph Stuntz, a twenty-four-year-old Coeur d’Alene Indigenous man from the Lapwai Reservation in Idaho, and two FBI agents were killed in a shootout at Pine Ridge, South Dakota.³³ Special Agents Jack R. Coler and Ronald A. Williams were allegedly investigating an altercation and burglary (of a pair of boots). The suspect was a man named Jimmy Eagle, who was also wanted for questioning in connection to the assault and robbery of two ranch hands. The agents followed a vehicle that matched the description of the truck Eagle was driving when someone, or multiple people, opened fire on the agents. The agents radioed for backup but were killed. A few hours later, a Bureau of Indian Affairs agent shot and killed Stuntz, an AIM member who’d allegedly been part of the shootout.

But Leonard Peltier was also a suspect in the shootout, and after fleeing Pine Ridge, he ended up on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.³⁴ He fled to Canada and was eventually apprehended in Hinton, Alberta, and extradited back to the U.S. Peltier is still in prison to this day, the sole AIM member to be convicted in the deaths of the two agents, despite the fact that the casings from the bullets that killed the agents allegedly did not match Peltier’s gun. Two other AIM members were charged and tried separately but were found not guilty. But the violence wasn’t over. In December 1975, Annie Mae Pictou Aquash disappeared. Like many other activists, Sainte-Marie feared the worst.

On February 24, 1976, an unidentified female body was found on the side of the road on the Pine Ridge Reservation.³⁵ Initially, it was reported that she’d died of exposure, as the coroner somehow failed to notice the bullet hole at the back of her head at the base of her skull. Her hands were cut off by the coroner and sent for fingerprinting to the FBI headquarters in Washington. Rather than wait for confirmation of her identity, the body was quickly buried and marked as “Jane Doe.”

Eventually the body was identified as Annie Mae Pictou Aquash. She was just thirty years old when she died, leaving behind two little girls, Deborah and Denise. On March 10, 1976, her body was exhumed at the request of her family and members of AIM. A second autopsy was performed, and the real cause of death—that she was shot in the back of her head—was confirmed. Rumors began to circulate, allegedly instigated by the FBI, that Aquash had been an FBI informant killed by AIM members because of information she’d provided about Peltier’s involvement in the shooting of the two FBI agents.

For decades, Aquash’s murder remained unsolved. Over those same decades, Leonard Peltier’s conviction and sentencing was held up as proof of the systemic injustice against Native Americans. This is the background to Sainte-Marie’s song, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” which took fourteen years for her to complete. The song is something of a time capsule, filled with the information Sainte-Marie had at the time.

“There were a lot of things going on,” Sainte-Marie says. “There were tragedies. Leonard Peltier’s trial was a grotesque travesty and a mockery of American justice, and he’s been in prison ever since, even though the bullets didn’t match the gun. Three people were killed at Pine Ridge. Later, Annie Mae Aquash was murdered. We didn’t hear all this information in a three-minute song one day. The incidents at Wounded Knee continued to unspool and come to light over many years.”

The fourteen years it took her to get “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” right was the longest Sainte-Marie has ever worked on a song. “When I was putting it together, I was trying to do a lot of things,” she recalls. “Obviously, I was trying to quell some kind of emotional turmoil in myself to come to grips with what had happened, to resolve it in a way that I could share with other people and have it all hang on irrefutable facts. It’s kind of like making a movie. And I do care that it hangs on irrefutable facts because I know that people can challenge it. Sometimes they do—usually they don’t, though, because I did a pretty good job and even people who check find out, ‘Holy shit. She was right.’”

There were numerous twists and turns to Peltier’s imprisonment, and mysteries about Aquash’s tragic murder, and after Sainte-Marie released her song, events continued to unfold. In 2004, AIM member Arlo Looking Cloud was convicted of Aquash’s murder.³⁶ In 2009, AIM member John Graham was charged, along with Thelma Conroy-Rios, for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Aquash.³⁷ Graham was convicted in 2010, and Conroy-Rios pled guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence.³⁸ All three were held accountable for Aquash’s murder, and speculation remains that Peltier was involved too. Aquash’s daughters, Debbie and Denise, believe that high-ranking AIM members ordered her execution due to fears that she was an informant.

“I’m very hesitant to talk about Annie Mae for some very strong reasons,” Sainte-Marie says. “Barack Obama lost the last chance to pardon Leonard Peltier, and some of Annie Mae’s family believe that Leonard’s story impacts Annie Mae’s in terrible ways. And I cannot shed any light since I wasn’t there. I have to admit that although I knew both Leonard and Annie Mae years ago, I really can’t speak to what happened in those days. However, all these years later, I know Annie Mae’s daughters and sister, and I do believe their research, even though it implicates some old friends in terrible ways. I loved Annie Mae, and I just have to kind of step aside and not comment about what I don’t know.”