SAINTE-MARIE WAS SINGING about environmental justice long before most musicians. Indigenous people have been at the forefront of environmental protest—and have suffered from environmental racism—for hundreds of years. And yet, throughout Sainte-Marie’s life, she observed a sort of colonization of the movement as environmentalism moved into the mainstream; “green” energy took off amidst anti-oil and anti-pipeline sentiment, food security evolved, and climate change became central to discussions about environmental disasters. In Canada and in the U.S., protests in the 1990s and 2000s—including demonstrations in British Columbia in 1993 against logging old-growth forests at Clayoquot (“the War of the Woods”), the WTO violence in Seattle in 1999, and opposition by various Indigenous groups to nuclear waste disposal on or near their lands—drew international attention. In 2006, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore became the unlikely face of global warming with his award-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, for which he won a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. But the truth is, Indigenous people were (and are) doing the day-to-day hard work, the actual blood, sweat, and, tears on the ground, the grassroots resistance work, and with little or no recognition.

Sainte-Marie’s next comeback album, 2008’s Running for the Drum, centered Indigeneity in environmental justice and skewed heavily towards protest, activism, and decolonization anthems. She wrote the songs at a time when “people started to really notice climate change and corporate greed and the destruction of the earth that benefited only a few short-sighted people.” Show business is not just about money and competition, she says, or besting people you knew in high school, and she rejects the “me, me, me” thinking that’s so prevalent in sports, music, and business. The music was bold and visceral, thumping rock tunes that incorporated traditional and powwow elements, like “No No Keshagesh,” a powerful rocker about environmental destruction. “Keshagesh” is a Cree word that roughly translates as “greedy guts,” and was the name of a puppy at the Piapot home on the reserve who, she says, “used to eat all his own [food] and then want everybody else’s.” It’s a scathing tune, sly and clever and funny, and unrelentingly propulsive with a chorus of pounding powwow-style backing chants and hand claps as Sainte-Marie sings, “No, no, Keshagesh, you can’t do that no more.”

Sainte-Marie’s lyrics are incisive and couched in satire: “Ol’ Columbus he was lookin’ good/When he got lost in our neighborhood” or “Got Mother Nature on a luncheon plate/They carve her up and call her real estate.” The references are often to all-too-real devastations. “These things are so obvious and so horrifying,” she says. “God bless Naomi Klein and Winona LaDuke. Some of us have to say something, and this is my way of saying it.” In the song, she also talks about how the burden of protecting the planet and advocating for it often falls to Indigenous people with the least resources. “The reservation out on Poverty Row/There’s something cookin’ and the lights are low,” she sings. “People are trying save our Mother Earth,” she says, “even though they’re broke.”

And the inverse of poverty-stricken, exploited Indigenous people attempting to protect the environment are the shortsighted businessmen whom Sainte-Marie calls out, over and over throughout the song. She’s particularly pleased with the line, “Oh brother Midas, looking hungry today.” “That says a lot, just that one line. Midas is the guy who had the ability to turn anything he touched into gold, and what did he do? He touched his beloved daughter and she turned into gold. That’s kind of the Midas thinking behind a lot of short-sighted corporations and greed heads.” The lyrics continue, pointed and sharp: “What he can’t buy he’ll get some other way/Send in the troopers if the Natives resist.”

Sainte-Marie laughs knowingly and a little bitterly as she recalls the ways in which non-Indigenous people have repeatedly minimized and dismissed her warnings. “And here comes Standing Rock and all of the in-between things that nobody ever heard about between the 1970s and Standing Rock. It’s been going on all along.”

“It” is colonial greed and the willingness to sacrifice everything, even one’s own capacity for survival, in order to make a quick buck. What she doesn’t understand is how, with the full evidence of current corruption and environmental destruction and exploitation, more songwriters aren’t saying it with her. “It’s kind of obvious right now, and I sincerely don’t know what to make of it. People think that they have to join either the Us team or the Them team—things are so polarized right now, everybody feels like they have to be on the right side so that when the shit comes down, they won’t get covered in it.” She laughs. “But that’s not how it is. Somewhere along the line you become a grown-up and start thinking with your own brain and seeing a bigger picture that includes everybody. At least hopefully.”

“No No Keshagesh” addresses the past, present, and future, and expresses Sainte-Marie’s belief in life in a circle, or how to make it work in such a way that nobody loses. Because so many of her ideas seem to be ten or twenty years in advance of anyone being ready to hear them, she finds that people constantly turn to her for solutions, be they environmental or social. “Every time people ask me, ‘How do we solve this problem or that problem in your opinion?’ it’s always the same answer: Stay calm and decolonize.”

Sainte-Marie laughs after she says this, but anyone who’s paid attention to her songs knows that this is the mantra she’s been living since her earliest days on the folk scene. Well before “decolonize,” a term meaning to remove the toxic effects of colonization, entered the vernacular, there were countless Indigenous people—leaders, activists, scholars, defenders, artists, and educators—who advocated for the existence, protection, and rights of their people, including cultural, environmental, and land claims. Among them was Sainte-Marie, whose music communicated a vital personal reality and living history, and who used a microphone and a spotlight to make sure her message made it into as many hearts and minds as possible.

“Helping people to decolonize can be a pleasure, because sometimes decolonizing can help people to understand how that old baloney negatively affects them,” Sainte-Marie says. “A lot of people are frightened, especially whenever you mention Indian issues or Black issues. If people are exclusively white, if they’ve grown up and haven’t gone to school with people from other countries or other races, and they’re really quite insular—or they might be privileged but still be inexperienced and lack empathy—they may have grown up in a business family where their bottoms are stuck on the bottom line and what matters is the coins. [They fear that] ‘those other people are going to try to take something, so you’d better exploit them first!’ The old zero-sum colonial illusion.”

Sainte-Marie knows that when some white people hear the word “decolonize,” this is their assumption. “That’s not what it’s about. You can have your money. But if you happen to be into charity, please think beyond the usual tax loopholes or what your family has always given to: the opera, the ballet, the diseases. Although these are important, and I support them too, please trust yourself with getting more information, including about innovative start-ups who are not doing it the same old way that has been failing for years. Please understand that many of the most important issues of today are not set up in a way that your accountant would be able to understand at first glance. In other words, life in the hierarchy is the only life that many business people have known, where it’s all about ‘the Get.’ They have never known life in a circle, where it’s all about sustaining Life itself for the next seven generations.”

Sainte-Marie is heartened when she sees activists’ years of work translate into real societal change. For her, one of the most important was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), established in 2008 to address more than 120 years of systemic and institutionalized abuse inflicted on Indigenous people in Canada. “For me, Truth and Reconciliation was really, really important. Years ago, I had written ‘My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying,’ with my own heart, and [I felt] so alone,” she explains. “The stories that my own relatives in Saskatchewan told me about their experiences in residential schools—I was witnessing for fifty years before Truth and Reconciliation came along. I highly supported it. The information just needs to be out there. It’s fucking awful, but it needs to be out there and it needs to be addressed.”

The TRC attempted to tackle the damage caused by the residential school system, which was funded by the Canadian government and administered by Christian churches for more than a hundred years. The Commission, which concluded its seven-year investigation in December 2015, made ninety-four “Calls to Action” concerning a wide range of issues, from a demand for official apologies to improvements in the justice system and Indigenous health and wellness.

Sainte-Marie sees a connection between the sexual abuse in residential schools and her own sexual abuse as a child in that both are a function of the good-old-boy colonial blueprint that hasn’t changed much since Biblical times. “The priests, the ministers, the nuns, and the Indian agents were all sexually repressed people, and like soldiers, they were raised, trained, and expected to be servants of a feudal hierarchy familiar with torture, humiliation, misogyny, and coercion,” Sainte-Marie says. “Today, a lot of the descendants of this system are okay with it; they’re trying to normalize the abnormal, and they believe that rape is universal human nature—but it’s not. Like war, it’s just greedy men’s dreams. Rape is a choice, a cultural aberration of certain societies, including historical Europe, where rape was a reward for the king’s sexually repressed soldiers, and misogyny and child abuse were no big deal and nobody’s business.”

In Sainte-Marie’s view, it leads all the way back through Europe’s sick history of bad leadership, mandated by the Doctrine of Discovery. “The big racket as it pertains to children is much bigger than racism,” Sainte-Marie says. “Ever read Charles Dickens? Europeans exploited their own children and oppressed their own neighbors before they ever got to us. The slave trade and the king’s military were both implicated in the template for how Indigenous children all over the world were treated by Europeans. Little children who were kidnapped from a natural life and sent to live in residential schools without family or community were certainly not a match for such a system. Beyond the established European market for Indigenous child slaves, European literature is full of evidence that suggests bullying and abuse of little kids in their own homes were common, obvious, and no big deal. And, of course, I was one more of the little kids that that kind of men did it to, even without a residential school. And nobody even noticed.”

She remembers the trauma only too well. “It’s incredibly disempowering to be the slave of an adult and to have to do things that are described as being shameful,” Sainte-Marie says. “You’re threatened throughout your whole childhood by people who outweigh you, so you’re always under stress, always being bullied, having to do even more. [The threat of] being exposed—‘I’ll tell all your friends’—is just awful. Awful.”

Talking about the abuse she experienced as a child is still a work in progress for Sainte-Marie. In the late 1980s, she participated in a support group for adult survivors of child abuse. “This kind of thing never leaves you. It’s always in the back of your mind. I mean your lack of identity; not knowing who you are or what the rules are or whether it’s fair for people to mistreat you in this big, bad world where men rule everything and older rules younger and more powerful rules less powerful and white rules Indigenous, when you’re just trying to find a safe place to fit in unnoticed.”

The support group consisted of five women who met once a week to talk about their lives and what had happened to them. After a few weeks, the person running the group asked the women to take part in a healing exercise. “She wanted each of us to envision ourselves as that poor abused kid from way back when—which was very easy for me to do—and she wanted us to go over to that poor kid and tell her, ‘I’m going to take care of you now.’ Maybe that comes from twelve-step programs or AA, or maybe it’s a well-known thing that I just never came across, but I thought it was wonderful.”

In doing that, Sainte-Marie recalled an indelible picture of herself at around six or seven years old, standing by the pond where they used to camp in the woods. “I had this continual sense that ‘someone’ was looking after me,” Sainte-Marie remembers. “And I didn’t give ‘her’ a name, a shape, or form; I didn’t say she was an angel, I didn’t say it was anything. If I thought of her as anything, it was like thinking of my buddy, Mother Nature, who I would eventually grow into. It sounds silly when I say it. But what it connected within me was to envision that little girl I used to be, to go over and comfort her, and to become that little girl’s feminine savior person in ‘our’ own life, who had been there all along; to actually materialize to that little kid who believed in Someday, and let her know that she’s safe now, I’m here to protect her. And I guess that was what was supposed to happen, but it still floors me that it did work because I don’t usually go along with self-help books, but this was very good.”

She believes in sharing her story when it’s appropriate and relevant. She also wants to make it clear that sexual abuse isn’t just about a physical act; it’s also about the psychological ramifications. “Sexual abuse is about bullying,” Sainte-Marie says. “Sexual abuse is about an adult or older person having complete control of a powerless person. And the things that follow most sexual abuse—there’s the ‘act’ itself, whatever it is, but then there’s the rest of it—the keeping it quiet, the humiliation, the threats, and the bullying. You’re frightened all the time that it’s going to happen again, he might get me again, he might make me do that again. Or, as you get older, [the threat of] ‘If you ever tell, I’ll tell your friends what you like to do.’ A big person can turn it on a smaller person. Well, that kind of man will always turn it on a woman. I don’t care how old you are, he comes back, and pretty soon you are the one in the doghouse, right?”

Many of the residential school survivors had never confronted their own abuse until the TRC. “It was just what had ‘happened,’ and it wasn’t the only thing that had happened,” Sainte-Marie says. The abuse was almost normalized because of how widespread it was in the residential school system and how intergenerational the trauma was. And yet it was still a secret shame that was almost impossible for survivors to put into words, particularly when they’d spent a lifetime trying so hard to forget.

“I’m a songwriter; I package my passions and my emotions into a form that’s discussable, and that’s what art and philosophy can do,” Sainte-Marie says. “But the survivors of war and domestic violence and residential schools, in order to survive, don’t package it into an episode that they can deal with and get rid of it. Most of the survivors of residential schools don’t have any money. They don’t ever go to a psychiatrist who can help them to deal with what happened to them. They’re told that it’s shameful, bury it.”

But when shared trauma has infected most of a community or an entire family, solidarity can collapse into something harder, more brittle. “Many sexual abuse survivors are told, ‘That happened to all of us. You’re not special. Get over it,’” Sainte-Marie says. “And that’s not adequate. We need a lot more help than that. They were raised without mothering, without hugs, without laughter and childhood fun and parental guidance. They didn’t learn how to make family or be parents. And for us, the ‘boogeyman’ was real.”

Sainte-Marie says that for some adopted people, there’s a real shame in not knowing where they come from. The questions are endless. “‘What, did your mother fool around? Were you a foundling? Did somebody not want you and you were given away?’” she recalls. “There are all these possible painful scenarios that you never know. You don’t even get to have a damn horoscope ’cause you don’t know when or where you were born! You not only don’t know who the white soldiers were who raped your great-grandmother, or the name of their sons who raped your mother, or the other guys who raped your sisters, but you don’t even know, in most cases, who your Native American ancestors were because the colonials changed people’s names. It leaves a big hole where your self-esteem ought to be, and it’s heartbreaking, over and over again.”

In sharing her personal experiences and framing them in relation to colonialism, Sainte-Marie illustrates not just the ongoing horror of childhood sexual abuse, but also the consequences of colonialism, historical and contemporary. “The problem of decolonizing neither starts nor ends in Indian country,” she says. “The family style of contemporary North America needs to change. We need to break the cycle here and now. The pecking order, where dad and his dick and his wallet run everything? Not happening anymore—obsolete, old fashioned, lame. Did pedophilia only happen in residential schools? I think not. Entitlement and abuses of power start in the home, and it is truly time to break the cycles: bullying, abuse, alcohol, and drugs. You might have to get out of town to get away from old family habits successfully. However you do it, just break the cycle. It’s not disloyal: it’s survival.”

Life in a circle speaks to survival, and when Sainte-Marie headed out on the road again in 2008, she knew she wanted to be surrounded by musicians who didn’t just understand life in a circle but also lived it. Her identity is the heart of her music, and Running for the Drum was her first recording of new material since 1992’s Coincidence and Likely Stories. It was bursting with empowerment anthems and a challenging, complex sonic landscape of jazz, rock, powwow, and folk. She needed the right artists beside her who not only understood her message but could also amplify it accordingly. She also wanted a band that could rock hard.

Paquin Entertainment, which serves as her manager and agent, set up live auditions in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Over the course of two days, Sainte-Marie auditioned twenty-seven musicians while searching for her new touring band. She chose Winnipeg-based rock band A Gathering of Flies, which included Michel Bruyere (Ojibwe, drums), Jesse Green (Lakota/Ojibwe, guitar), and Darryl Menow (Cree, bass). She’d never truly had the opportunity to have her own band, her own team, behind her on the road. Running for the Drum was the first record Sainte-Marie ever toured with an all-Indigenous band. Sainte-Marie uses the word waskochepayis to describe what it was like when they played together. It’s a Cree term for the electricity created when thunder meets lightning.

“They all played great, and it helped that what I sang about and where my songs originated is a world they knew too: the passions of Native American realities,” she says. “It’s powwow rock, like little rez snapshots, it’s big love songs, and it’s all hot. Feels real comfortable, and it’s about more than just the music.”

Both Green and Bruyere remember Sainte-Marie from their childhoods. Her music was around, of course, but it was actually Sesame Street that made the biggest impression on them. “I was about five years old, I think, and she was with Cody on Sesame Street,” Bruyere remembers. “That was the first time I saw her. And it blew my mind because I looked at my grandmother, my kokom, and I remember I was so excited, and I said, ‘Is that us?’”

“Growing up, there weren’t many brown faces on TV. She was one of the few that I could see and relate to,” Green recalls. “It just made me feel proud to see an Aboriginal person on TV. It made me think we’re in the mainstream, we’re not forgotten. We are living in the contemporary world despite what’s going on.”

The band was crucial in leveling up the live concert intensity on some of the album’s biggest rock anthems, like the raucous “Working for the Government,” and “Cho Cho Fire,” an epic wake-up call to rediscover the power of fun, which included a powwow sample from the famed Black Lodge Singers they heard when they were kids.

Audiences and critics loved the record. American Songwriter called it a “triumphant return” and concert reviews lavished praise upon Sainte-Marie, such as the one in the Telegraph, which marveled at her “unfeasibly vivacious and passionate set” and described her performances as “dazzling” and “magnificent.”⁴⁹ Running for the Drum won the 2009 Juno for Aboriginal Recording of the Year. When she’d auditioned her band, she advised them to get their passports ready as they would probably be touring the album for two years. Instead, Sainte-Marie and the band stayed on the road for almost six years. It was unlike any tour she’d had before, and it gave her the opportunity to bring the songs and her messages to cities and reservations all over the world.

“It reminded me of when I suspected that Greenwich Village audiences were coming to ‘hear the little Indian girl cry,’ and my reaction was to concentrate on bringing great, positive shows to the reservations,” Sainte-Marie says. “Bring them ‘Indian Cowboy’ and a rock ’n’ roll band—they already had enough tears. I wanted my big love for our people and what’s left of our cultures to serve as a mirror in grassroots communities, especially in western Canada, but also in Australia, Norway, Japan. Shine a light on the beauties and realities of who Indigenous people really are, were, can be.”

It might not have been obvious at the time, but Sainte-Marie was at the forefront of a major renaissance in Indigenous music, particularly in Canada. However, even she couldn’t predict that her biggest comeback of all was still to come.