BEFORE THE INTERNET was big and the world got a little smaller—in a good way—children learned about the world primarily from the communities in which they were raised, from whatever they saw on television, and, at least in North America, from school curricula that were prescriptive, standardized, and entirely Eurocentric. History books presented a collection of pro-settler fairy tales as Indigenous people were killed and thousands of years of language, culture, customs, methodologies, practice, knowledge, and wisdom were suppressed, appropriated, and eradicated. And for many kids, school was boring and monotonous, no matter the subject, and the approach, for the most part, was formulaic and uninspired. The discrepancy between the education offered to privileged kids and disadvantaged ones was—and continues to be—criminal, particularly when it comes to the technology available.

That was the environment in 1996 in which Sainte-Marie would formally launch a radically new, Indigenous-focused education curriculum for children, built on a foundation of emerging technology, multimedia, and digital communication initiatives such as chat rooms and video conferencing. It would be a bridge between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children thousands of miles apart. It would be the future.

It’s easy to see the Cradleboard Teaching Project as a gift to Sainte-Marie’s childhood self and to countless generations of colonized Indigenous children who may have grown up without their culture, who were made to feel ashamed of it or were torn away from their families, traditions, and customs. It’s also easy to see how the material could teach non-Indigenous students about Indigeneity and help de-stigmatize Indigenous people, raise awareness of Indigenous realities and cultural practices and customs, and hopefully eradicate systemic racism towards Indigenous people.

Sainte-Marie founded Cradleboard officially in 1996 as an initiative of her Nihewan Foundation, but she had begun developing the curriculum in the eighties after one of Cody’s teachers, Adria Siebring, approached her. “She told me she was required by law to teach an Indian unit but that the material was all baloney.” Sainte-Marie says Siebring was embarrassed by the curriculum. “And she wanted to know—could I help?” In many ways, Sainte-Marie’s entire life had been moving towards this moment, or at the very least, it was certainly a relevant part of her circle. With her songs and television appearances, she’d already spent decades mapping historical and contemporary Indigenous experiences and contextualizing them for modern, mainstream audiences, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. “It really started in the 1960s when I was just a young singer with too much money, and I had all these aeroplane tickets,” she told an interviewer for The Guardian in a 2009 interview. “They’re the link to my whole existence because they’ve enabled me to travel. And if I have a concert in Stockholm, it means I can visit the Aboriginal people in the Arctic. Or if I’m playing in Melbourne or Sydney, I’ll go out and visit the Aboriginal people in the bush. The Cradleboard Project is a result of my experiences living in two worlds—the fancy show business world of hotels and aeroplanes—and spending time with interesting people who have a lot to say. I’m a bridge—Cradleboard helps connect people in Indigenous communities with the rest of the world.”⁴⁷

Her background in teaching and philosophy, as well as philanthropy and Indigenous cultural practices, helped Sainte-Marie craft a hands-on, interactive, multimedia learning curriculum for public grade schools that was embedded in core studies and still happened to reflect Indigenous people. It wasn’t an after school “extra” about beads and feathers, circular rubrics about north-south-east-west, or Boy Scout–type legends. It was core science, geography, math, music, and government studies as found in actual Indigenous communities both ancient and modern. She felt no need to argue with the ways schools taught or tear anything down. Instead, she felt that there were ways to incorporate Indigenous realities into what was already in place. These would enhance the way most core subjects were taught without subtracting from valuable teacher time. It would obviously improve the self-esteem of Indigenous kids, but it would also add value to what non-Indigenous kids had to study anyway, by the inclusion of culture. More than that, because it was multimedia and interactive, it would be more engaging for all students.

The curriculum she developed for Cody’s school was an extension of what Saint-Marie had started in 1969 when she founded the Nihewan Foundation to help Indigenous youth get to college. Nihewan didn’t just give Indigenous youth scholarships; it also helped them navigate the process of applying to school, finding other financial aid sources, and breaking down barriers to entry in academia. She’s incredibly proud of the fact that two Nihewan scholarship recipients became Tribal College presidents, and it validated Sainte-Marie’s belief in this type of giving.

Sainte-Marie found a place in which she could not only channel her teaching degree, but also put into practice what she had done for five years as a regular, part-time member of Sesame Street. If she could Indigenize the standard curriculum—both through providing factually correct information about contemporary Indigenous people as well as exploring science, technology, and other core subjects through Indigenous lenses—she could reach new kids all the time and open their eyes to other options. She folded the work into the scope of the Nihewan Foundation and began to build towards the Cradleboard Teaching Project. Sainte-Marie kept refining the material over the years, adding units to the existing public school curriculum.

Technology was essential to Sainte-Marie’s emerging vision for Cradleboard. Thanks to her early adoption of Mac computers and her lifelong fascination with useful cutting-edge tech, she helped pioneer interactive testing, twinning long-distance classes, and computer-based multi-sensory learning. Because of the relationship building that Sainte-Marie had done in online communities and early chat rooms, in 1991 she suggested connecting her son’s class in Hawai‘i with a classroom on a reserve in Canada.

“We connected a class at Island School in Hawai‘i with a class in Saskatchewan at the Star Blanket Reserve where my cousin was teaching, first through pen pals and faxes, and then online. Both classes had been studying our new lessons,” Sainte-Marie recalls proudly. “But when the kids connected, it all came alive. The early online remote connectivity required tech help and patience, but it was worth it to see the kids interacting live with their far-away partners.” Sainte-Marie wrote on Cradleboard’s website: “The kids also exchanged letters and boxes of local goodies and information about their communities, their schools, and most of all themselves. They also had their first experience with email and Live Chat on a computer, which was very new at the time.”

But what added unique value to the classroom partnering, she says, is that all the children in both communities were suddenly studying their old school subjects in a new way, “through Native American eyes. It was the combination of live partnering and new culture-based curriculum content that stunned the education community.”

A 1998 feature in Wired magazine talked about the importance of Cradleboard’s online space in creating connection between youth who might otherwise never meet. Sainte-Marie referred to that connection metaphorically as “the fire.” “They ask anything they want: ‘Do you live in tepees? Do you hunt buffalo? Do you still smoke pot in those peace pipes?’” Sainte-Marie told Wired. “By looking at the questions the kids are asking, we learn the scope of what needs to be done.”⁴⁸ For core subjects, she developed the Cradleboard lessons for three distinct levels—elementary, middle, and high school. Building the lessons to be delivered on interactive CD-ROMs, she and her team provided teacher lesson plans, tests and quizzes, automatic grading, progress reports, interactive maps, videos, audiotapes, charts, and numerous other features. “Many of them were actually fun,” Sainte-Marie says. “The teaching tools and books used in North American schools never provided any idea that Indigenous cultures had their own intellectual collateral and ways of teaching regarding science, geography, social studies, and government. Everybody thinks the Greeks invented everything like science and democracy. Actually, everybody who has survived has done so because of their own successful ways of doing science. And the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which kept the peace for 1,100 years, actually practiced democracy, which the Greeks only talked about.”

As an educator, Sainte-Marie wanted students of all backgrounds to have the option to learn about the fascinating collateral of Indigenous innovation and invention and for educators using the program to have access to alternative methods and thought processes. There was so much to be learned from traditional Indigenous models of life and learning, she says, so many friendships possible despite the fact that much had been eradicated through colonization, assimilation, and extermination. This was an opportunity to emphasize alternative models that could benefit everybody.

Cradleboard emphasized the concept of living in a circle, seeing one’s self as part of the continuum, and therefore affected by everything that came before—beginning, middle, and end. In studying government through Indigenous eyes, fourth-grade Cradleboard kids learned about the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Plains Tribes’ and the Pueblo forms of government, and discovered that—surprise, surprise—there are multiple ways to govern, not just one based in parliamentary hierarchy. Without tearing anything else down, Cradleboard taught that there are alternative ways of governing not rooted in colonialism.

“At Cradleboard we didn’t even bother to include history,” Sainte-Marie says. “It’s what many people expected we were doing, maybe because that’s what they would have done. ‘Oh yeah, the Indians must be mad. Now they want to educate us by shoving it up the white man who has told so many lies!’ No. Cradleboard has nothing to do with ‘getting even’ or building a business or any of that. Cradleboard is this additional option to learn core subjects through Indigenous perspectives without shaming anybody. It’s about information. Besides delivering core science—which has no ethnicity—Cradleboard methods allow people to see the beauty, fun, laughter, joy, and power of Indigenous cultures while doing their science lesson. It’s sharing the principles of science through culture in a way that most students would never come across, and it’s a lot of fun.”

The program’s multimedia features were new at the time, but according to Sainte-Marie, they also simplified the learning process, making it more natural and instinctual. More than twenty years after its inception, she still gets excited about the way in which aspects of the curriculum worked to inform a whole. “Here’s an example of how it works at grade six when students are required to study the principles of sound. Frequency and amplitude—which have no ethnicity—have usually been taught by reading about them in a book, which is hard to understand. We presented the lessons as interactive multimedia, via video and computers, so that the kids are learning from hands-on experience themselves instead of just reading about them. To see the difference between frequency (pitch) and amplitude (loudness), the students can operate the same kind of sliders we use in recording studios. They can actually see and hear the sound waves get louder and quieter as they raise and lower the amplitude slider with their own fingers. That’s called multi-sensory learning. And cultural experts, kids, and teachers from the [Indigenous] communities did the video presentations, so children could see some actual Indigenous faces on camera.”

Sainte-Marie had endured a lifetime of Indigenous people being viewed as decoration, of having cultural traditions appropriated by “unknowledgeable movie vultures” or artists who would champion their “love” for Indigenous people, but really didn’t do anything to help. Most North Americans “saw us in the way that a child sees someone in a parade” she says.

Sainte-Marie recalls one example of this in her own life. It was during one of two Pete Seeger shows in which she performed. At the finale, everyone gathered onstage together to sing Woody Guthrie’s famous song, “This Land Is Your Land.” “I just couldn’t do it,” she says. “Pete was wonderful but like everyone else onstage, completely oblivious to how that song impacts Indigenous listeners. As Charlie Hill used to sing, ‘This land is your land. It used to be my land.’ I told Pete’s producer I didn’t want to do it. He nicely insisted. I stood onstage but didn’t actually sing. It was a real conflict at the moment for me and it became one more of many lessons in patience, doing what we can whenever we get a chance to make positive change without making things worse. Part of the success in surviving this kind of thing is to understand that. In this case, Pete and Woody and company were not my enemies: they just didn’t know. There was no reason to create an escalation of negativity. Much later in life, I mentioned it to Pete, and he saw my point. But most people do not listen between the lines, and we need to understand that. That’s why I don’t restrict myself to show business, and it’s partly the same reason I created the Cradleboard Teaching Project: because people who should know don’t know—and they deserve to know.”

In 1994, Sainte-Marie addressed a conference of Native American women in Montana, in which attendees were encouraged to take a new look at the potential role of Indigenous people and content in education. “I have a passion for content about Indigenous people in the Americas,” Sainte-Marie says. Dr. Valorie Johnson, an educator and Seneca program officer at the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic foundations in the U.S., heard her speak. A few weeks later, Buffy got a call from Norbert Hill, Johnson’s colleague and the brother of her friend, comedian Charlie Hill. They wondered whether Buffy would like to present a proposal to Kellogg to support her educational mission. Up until then, Buffy had been funding the work of her Nihewan Foundation, including Cradleboard, on her own dime—“my leftover singing money,” she called it—and had never considered approaching a big foundation. She contacted her friend, former Mohawk chief Harold Tarbell, and together they created the Cradleboard proposal. It was approved by the Kellogg Foundation with a budget of $1.5 million over two years, which Sainte-Marie leveraged thanks to further support from the other philanthropies to model the project. Although Kellogg dollars were mandated to serve American children first and foremost, Sainte-Marie found ways to include Canadian content throughout the new curriculum.

For the curriculum itself, Sainte-Marie secured input from a variety of educators, including scholars from thirty-three tribal colleges. According to Cradleboard’s website, within its first two years, Sainte-Marie modeled the project in Mohawk, Cree, Ojibwe, Menominee, Coeur d’Alene, Navajo, Quinnault, Hawai‘ian, and Apache communities in eleven states. By 1998, Cradleboard was being used in thirty-three classrooms across the United States.

Sainte-Marie had seen the ways in which non-Indigenous people ignored or put forward a bastardized representation of Indigeneity throughout her life. “The fact is that students in North America have usually studied Indians in the fall, after the volcanoes and dinosaurs, and before Columbus,” she says. “Then we show up at Halloween as Halloween costumes. But once Thanksgiving myths and Halloween are over, the important subjects go back to being only, only, only, in italics and underlined and in quotes, only Eurocentric. What kind of message does that give to non-Indian kids and teachers and families about us? That we’ve vanished or are not part of the serious world of science and government, etcetera. And what kind of message does it give to Indigenous kids and teachers and families? That we’re obsolete like the dinosaurs, like a costume; we’re not even real. What a waste of exciting potential, when it’s so easy to do it right by including us in the actual core subjects.”

The old-fashioned educational system hadn’t been enough for Sainte-Marie when she was growing up, trying to fill in the blanks in her life, and she hoped Cradleboard, like her appearances on Sesame Street and her songs, would help counter the tokenization of Indigenous people. “Somebody might write a song and be real pissed off at ‘how tokenized we are.’ But the point is why we’re tokenized, and can we fix it. And yes, we can. Little by little, person by person, song by song, incident by incident, rally by rally. It’s how it happens in real life. It was never our primary goal to build a big business, to settle old scores, or compete with anybody else. Our goal was to model a way to help children and teachers—both Indigenous and non-Indigenous—to learn core subjects like science, government, and geography, through Native American cultural perspectives.”

Most public schools in the early 1990s did not have computers in classrooms and neither did tribal schools. Part of the initial W. K. Kellogg grant was used to provide not only computers to remote communities but, in some cases, the actual data lines. Educators like Pamela Livingston, who is quoted on the Cradleboard website, had never seen anything like it before. “This is the only thing of its type being done. It is the best example I’ve come across of excellence in education technology. It is such a superb answer to the question: ‘What are you doing with all that hardware?’ and to the type of anti-computer backlash happening right now. Instead of having kids do Math Blasters, our kids are interacting in chats, live video conferences, e-mail, and via regular mail with children they would never encounter otherwise, while learning authentic Native American history past and present.”

In addition to the financial contribution of the Kellogg Foundation, Sainte-Marie had to seek out other partnerships as well. “Key to our initial success was Harold Tarbell who was the former chief at the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation,” she explains. “Their neighboring reservation had built Akwesasne Freedom School, one of the earliest and best Indigenous full-service schools based in their own Indigenous language.” Harold Tarbell was familiar with working in organizations large and small, government, tribal, and private on both sides of the border. He became Cradleboard’s project director and he and Sainte-Marie brought educators together for regional conferences over the next several years as they continued to expand the curriculum. They included teachers and students from Indigenous communities in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Sweden, and New Zealand. For the U.S. national conference in Hawai‘i, teachers learned the new curriculum, software, and Cradleboard methods, while the students played Hawai‘ian games, interacted with local multicultural kids, and in the case of Little Black Bear School from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, sang powwow music with the big drum they’d brought from home while their classmates 4,000 miles away watched on classroom computers.

The group of educators who led the American Indian Tribal College movement were also key partners and supporters of the project. Several of the presidents and founders of the colleges, including the two aforementioned Nihewan scholarship recipients, served on Cradleboard’s advisory board. Many of the tribal colleges were already associated with grade schools in their local communities and welcomed the new project with excitement. They helped Cradleboard create classroom partnerships between distantly remote but same-grade classes. The class that delivered the curriculum was the Indigenous partner, and the recipient was a non-Indigenous partner in another part of the U.S.

Despite these partnerships, some teachers expressed discomfort with their own qualifications to teach the material. “Some non-Indian teachers would say, ‘I just don’t feel qualified to deliver this material to students. I feel so guilty about the things that have happened in history, and there’s just so much I don’t know,’” Sainte-Marie recalls. “And Aboriginal teachers would say the same thing but in a different way: ‘I just don’t feel qualified to teach this. Nobody taught me. I don’t really know much, and I certainly can’t teach about different tribal communities.’”

One school located on the U.S.–Canadian border, the Akwesasne Freedom School, worried at first that they couldn’t teach about other nations like the Navajos and the Apaches. But they didn’t have to: all they had to do was provide information about whatever they wanted their partner schools to know about their own group. Expert teachers taught about their own people, and each school called its own shots. Navajos taught about Navajos. Apaches taught about Apaches. “But at first, everybody felt either some lack of knowledge, or some guilt or some bitterness,” Sainte-Marie says.

Sainte-Marie has a story that she shares with people when they express guilt or bitterness about the impacts and devastation of colonization. Some teachers advised the children to suppress those feelings, but Sainte-Marie has a different approach. “Imagine some people out on the plains, a long time ago, bending over and picking things up and putting them in a bag. I ask the kids, ‘What are they gathering?’ And they say, ‘rocks,’ or ‘food.’ But it’s none of those things. It’s dried buffalo chips, which is manure, of course, and the kids all laugh when I tell them. ‘No, don’t throw it away; you can use it,’ I say. What can you do with dried, discarded doo-doo? You don’t just throw it away, you take it home and do the thing that only human beings can do: you use it to make fire! If you can make fire, you can make light and heat, and you can make community around the fire—you can read a book around a fire, you can write a book around a fire. You can fall in love around the fire. Or you can take that dried manure and put it on the garden like fertilizer and grow something brand-new!

“Guilt and bitterness and a lot of things in life are like that. Don’t just hate it because it’s stinky: let it dry out and then use it. But not like makeup or your badge of identity—‘Oh, I’m so-o guilty, oh I’m the bitterest person in the world.’ That’ll get you nowhere. See, you gotta let it dry out. Then you can use it like fuel, turn it into light, use it to grow something else, like a song, or a lesson, or a new attitude about going to college and finding out for yourself what you can do in this world.” That there are gifts in everything, even in the shit, is a good philosophy, but this anecdote also speaks to natural cycles and our relationship to the earth, the value of time and distance, and separating ourselves from the mess until the time is right to deal with it. The values in Sainte-Marie’s story share space with Cradleboard’s values, which are also reflected in her songs, paintings, writing, and thinking.

In 1997, the Cradleboard Teaching Project was commended by President Bill Clinton’s One America Initiative on Race as one of more than three hundred “promising practices.” Sainte-Marie had major goals to expand Cradleboard into different states as well as to increase the scope of its subject matter. She had begun a partnership with NASA to develop a high school curriculum on astronomy, engineering, and careers in science, when the government experienced a massive political shift with the election of George W. Bush. None of the people at NASA with whom she’d become friendly returned her calls any longer—if they were even there. “People don’t realize that sometimes in the U.S., when there’s a change of administration, NASA is one of the things that changes,” Sainte-Marie says. “Some of the people who used to have a job? They don’t have that job anymore. Bush put his own people in.”

Sainte-Marie lost confidence that Cradleboard would be able to continue to secure adequate funding, so she decided to go back out on the road and tour the U.S. and wherever else she could in order to make enough money to sustain the program. “When the Bush administration came in and talked about privatizing charities, I could see the funding drying up,” Sainte-Marie says. “I really wanted Cradleboard to work without money, to be delivered free on the internet, but that was too early for most schools, which didn’t even have computers. I have a funny relationship to money. I wish that there were an alternative to it, but I don’t see it yet. But hopefully someday we’ll figure it out.”

Sainte-Marie never took a salary from the Nihewan Foundation. “I don’t mean just for grants for Cradleboard, but never, since I founded it in the 1960s, have I taken a salary,” she says. “It didn’t make any sense for me to get paid. For many organizations, it’s about providing jobs and building a big infrastructure. But for us, it really was about helping children and teachers and their communities through better education.” The project did, however, need to compensate regional and tribal teachers. When Cradleboard had money through grants, they’d hire people locally and regionally to run the program in their own areas. “They were the real foot soldiers who would interact with their principals and school boards,” Sainte-Marie says. “They were the first line of contact between us and the school.” When the funding crisis loomed, those positions were eliminated, and the program took the hit. Sainte-Marie started to use her spare time while on the road to go to colleges and universities to teach them what she could.

“I would host either a meeting or a Cradleboard presentation on my day off, and I’d let local college educators pick my brain,” she explains. “I was trying to teach them how to do what I was doing because it’s not that hard to do; it’s just a shift in consciousness mostly. I would work with their teacher education programs. I didn’t try to ‘addict’ them to our business, which I was advised to do—I mean, we had a business manager at one point, and I can see how building a brand and growing a business is done, but I don’t want to be that person. A lot of businesses are about capturing the public dollar, but, beyond survival, that wasn’t our Nihewan Foundation/Cradleboard Teaching Project goal.”

Sainte-Marie appreciates the philosophy of Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the World Wide Web), who declared that “information wants be free.” She shares that belief, which is why Cradleboard was never about building a business. “We were trying to help children,” she says. “On the one hand, I was trying to help children and parents of Indigenous backgrounds to have some impact, to be in the driver’s seat of knowing who they are and what they had to offer other people. And for the non-Indian children and their teachers and families, I was trying to provide them additional options in studying science, government, geography, and other core subjects through Indigenous perspectives. Most people have still never considered doing things in that way.”

In 2000, Sainte-Marie’s team created CD-ROMs titled Science Through Native American Eyes, which focused on the science of sound, friction, and lodge construction via interactive media, audio, text, animation, and video. It was to be the first of fifteen planned core curriculum CD-ROMs, and Sainte-Marie gave away thousands of discs to interested teachers and instructors. “I still hear from teachers who say that it’s just the best thing there ever was,” Sainte-Marie laughs. “And they ask, ‘Why isn’t more education done this way?’ But we know why. Because education itself is a very big business.”

Cradleboard has been on indefinite hiatus for more than a decade, but the website is still online, a reminder of a workable alternative or addition to colonizer-centered curricula. “I always felt good about the Cradleboard Teaching Project, my foundation, the participants, and everything,” Sainte-Marie says. “Our attitude is real, real positive. And we modeled something that really works, even if we were a little bit too early. But we are one of very few foundations whose attitudes are that positive because we’re not concentrating on coins. We’re about effectiveness and doing things, making things better for real. Helping people to decolonize can be a pleasure, because sometimes you can move people to a better understanding of how those remnants of colonial days still affect us all, and how we can replace the problem parts with solutions without tearing anything down. It’s mostly a shift in consciousness, and it doesn’t hurt.”

While she was working towards launching Cradleboard, Sainte-Marie was also quietly helping broadcaster Elaine Bomberry, who is Ojibwe and Cayuga from Six Nations, and Ojibwe singer-songwriter Shingoose (Curtis Jonnie) establish the Aboriginal category for the 1994 Juno Awards, the annual prizes given out by CARAS, the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (essentially the Canadian version of the Grammy Awards and arguably one of the biggest honors given to professional musicians in Canada). Bomberry had been invited to join the advisory committee for a category that she remembers as a euphemistic umbrella term like “world beat” or “global.”

“This was my first meeting with them, and everyone was talking about the criteria, how wide it was,” Bomberry says. “I think reggae was in there, soca, and then Native Canadian was listed, but it was, like, written in at the last minute. I just kind of went off. I said, ‘Our music doesn’t fit here, and it doesn’t fit in any of the categories!’ The president of CARAS at the time, Daisy Falle, was sitting beside me, and she leaned over and said, ‘Well, why don’t you start a category?’ and I just laughed.”

But Falle was serious and asked Bomberry to document fifteen Indigenous recordings from the previous year and fifteen in the coming one. The fax machine in her small office worked overtime as bands sent in their documentation. She ended up collecting information about twenty-five recordings in the previous year and forty in the coming one. Bomberry began to prepare her presentation with Shingoose when she got a surprise phone call. “It was Buffy, and I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ I let out a little bit of a scream!” Bomberry laughs. “Buffy goes, ‘I hear you’re doing a presentation to the CARAS board, and I’m just wondering if I can be of any help?’” Buffy’s advice was instrumental to Bomberry, though Sainte-Marie now downplays her role. “Elaine was the real brains behind it. I was just window-dressing and confirmation.” The presentation went off without a hitch, and the Best Music of Aboriginal Canada Recording category was born, though the name has changed a few times since its 1994 inception.

That also fortified a long friendship between the two women, a bond that was further strengthened the following year when Bomberry was hired to help produce the tribute to Sainte-Marie for her induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame during the 1995 Juno Awards broadcast. Bomberry remembers getting a call from Sainte-Marie who was upset at the direction the producers wanted to go in because there were so few Indigenous artists involved. “She was getting kind of discouraged,” Bomberry recalls. “She goes, ‘You know what they want? They want to bring out Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes to sing “Up Where We Belong,” and they want all these non-Native singers to sing my songs.’”

Sainte-Marie’s words inspired Bomberry, and she organized a tribute that was unlike anything most Canadians had ever seen before. Sainte-Marie was totally blown away. “Without my knowledge, Elaine recruited, booked, and organized a huge group of [102 Indigenous] dancers to enter the arena and dance into the Copps Coliseum in full powwow clothes, while Stoney Park, my favorite drum group from Morley, Alberta, sang an honor song, and Tom Jackson read a tribute.”

Decolonizing the Junos was the perfect way to honor Sainte-Marie, but it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t spoken out, and chances are that if Bomberry hadn’t been so closely acquainted with the Junos, she would not have been able to pull off what she’d organized that night. The Junos’ producers knew enough to hire Bomberry to help produce the tribute, but they didn’t understand that it would be essential to Sainte-Marie that her induction ceremony include and prioritize Indigenous artists. Yet again, Sainte-Marie was in the position of being able to open another door for power-holders to walk through.

Throughout the 1990s, she opened more and more doors through which Indigenous people could see themselves and their culture reflected back in education, the arts, and pop culture, and doors through which non-Indigenous people could consider the world from a different vantage point. As the millennium began, Sainte-Marie wasn’t just decolonizing the world; she was Indigenizing it, laying the foundation for her most revolutionary record yet.