IN 2012, INDIGENOUS grassroots activists made headlines with Idle No More, a protest against the Canadian government’s ongoing abuse of Indigenous people, their land rights, and wide-scale exploitations of the environment for profit. Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike participated in blockades and flash mobs, while video clips, a Twitter hashtag, and social media helped amplify the message of resisters and activists around the world. Support spread throughout the U.S. as more than thirty reported protests were held across the country, and solidarity protests were held in Sweden, the U.K., Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Egypt.⁵⁰

Simultaneously, a new generation of Indigenous artists, particularly in Canada, had dug deep into their ancestral and traditional music and fused that with contemporary styles to create bold, vivid, exciting sounds. A Tribe Called Red, the Ottawa-based crew, were crafting electronic powwow tracks that thumped, bumped, and signal-boosted cultural pride–meets-club bangers, songs that were as great on the dance floor as they were at a house party or a protest rally. Tanya Tagaq, an Inuk throat singer and songwriter, had been fusing the avant-garde and guttural for years, but she reached thrilling new levels of genius on her Polaris Music Prize–winning 2014 record, Animism.

Sainte-Marie herself was feeling inspired. She had just come off of a seemingly endless tour cycle with Running for the Drum and she should have been burnt out, but there was still so much more to say and do. She worked on songs with the band while they toured and revisited material that she’d written and recorded during the blacklist years. It sparked a fire that just wouldn’t go out, and when Geoff Kulawick of True North Records asked Sainte-Marie if she wanted to make another album, she said yes. “I flew around North America to interview seven producers to whom I gave a playlist of my homemade demos,” Sainte-Marie told Ottawa Life in 2015. She chose three: Chris Birkett, with whom she’d recorded before and who had relocated from the U.K. to Toronto; acclaimed pop producer Jon Levine (Drake, Serena Ryder, Nelly Furtado); and Juno Award–winning producer Michael Phillip Wojewoda (Barenaked Ladies’ Gordon and the Rheostatics’ Whale Music).

The result, 2015’s Power in the Blood, was Sainte-Marie’s most surprising and incendiary record since 1964’s It’s My Way! It’s a powerhouse album from start to finish, containing some of the best material she’s ever recorded. Her classic songwriting style—all guts and heart—is intact. Musically it takes huge risks, and thematically it’s a cohesive blast of Indigenous identity and authority, autonomy, and power. Galvanized by Idle No More and other grassroots activism, Power in the Blood signaled a bold new era in protest music and resistance.

“Indigeneity is such an interesting topic,” Sainte-Marie says, “and it’s the kind of conversation you couldn’t have had fifty years ago, because so many of us were either taken away to residential schools or some other school, or we were adopted out or we got lost in the system, or we were otherwise ‘bleached.’” Generations of Indigenous people were legislatively denied access to their mother tongue, ancestral cultures, and philosophies, and were taken from their family homes as children. Numerous systems (both secular and religious) attempted to assimilate and exterminate Indigenous people and their cultural practices. It was something Sainte-Marie had called out back in 1966, in “My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying,” with the line, “Now that we’re harmless and ‘safe’ behind laws.”

The word “power” in Power in the Blood has a double meaning that speaks to both indictment and resistance within her work. The word encompasses negative, colonial aspects, as well as the strength and survival implicit in Indigenous resistance. “One [interpretation] is the power of the feudal system and the patriarchy that’s been messing us all around since probably before the Old Testament,” Sainte-Marie says. “The other is the power of our own DNA to overcome and thrive in spite of challenges.” By anchoring her interpretation of “power” in a binary, Sainte-Marie shows us that these two things do not exist in isolated parallel streams, but rather inform each other while being rooted in the colonizer/colonized paradigm.

The album borrows its name from its first single, and like so many of Sainte-Marie’s best songs, “Power in the Blood” is deliberately thought provoking and multi-layered. It’s also the rare song that did not originate from her pen. It’s a cover, though she also rewrote parts of the song, by the British band Alabama 3, the same artists who wrote and performed the track used by The Sopranos (one of Sainte-Marie’s favorite shows) as its theme song. “Regardless of [the show’s] violence, all the Sopranos participants knew and understood the culture in which it was based, so it’s especially rich and believable,” Sainte-Marie says. “Besides, I was raised in an East Coast home where Dad was from an Italian, working-class family, where some of the boxes of candy hidden in the kitchen closet had ‘fallen off a truck’ or were ‘won in a race.’”

Thanks to the Sopranos theme song, she was already a fan of Alabama 3, and when she heard their 2002 song, “Power in the Blood,” she loved it. They were fans of hers too, so when she played a show in England in 2014, she invited them. “They came to my concert, and we stayed up all night with them afterwards at their studio. I said, ‘“Power in the Blood” would make a great peace song,’ and, of course, they all thought I was joking.” But Sainte-Marie was serious, and she rewrote and rearranged the song into an anthem of resistance. Alabama 3’s version talked about being ready for war, but Sainte-Marie flipped it, saying, “No, no, no to war!” It’s a promise, a life-affirming, thundering, electro-rock vow, propulsive and rhythmic, and it feels like a heartbeat taking over the listener’s entire body.

Even the placement of the song on the album is genius. “Power in the Blood” follows the bold album opener, a risky and wild reinvention of Sainte-Marie’s fifty-year-old classic, “It’s My Way.” But this isn’t the stark, acoustic folk song it was on her 1964 album. It’s steely and twangy, full of stomping, driving beats and electronic elements, and the texture of her voice brings a beautiful weight to the song’s words. Kicking off the album with this one-two punch of one of her oldest songs and her newest is a brilliant juxtaposition, and it wasn’t just fans who took notice. Critics were right there from the beginning too. NPR’s Ann Powers wrote, “Those who know her mostly by reputation as a standout of the early sixties folk revival will be delighted to discover an artist who’s more Bjork than Baez, more Kate Bush than Laurel Canyon. Sainte-Marie is a risk-taker, always chasing new sounds, and a plain talker when it comes to love and politics.”⁵¹ The Telegraph called it “one of her best.”⁵²

In 2015, Power in the Blood claimed the Polaris Music Prize, Canada’s richest award for artistic achievement in music, which also carries serious cachet for its recipients. Modeled after the Mercury Prize, Polaris is awarded solely for artistic merit, has nothing to do with record sales, and has a reputation for being very hip. The win received international coverage, including in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Billboard, and The Guardian, which ran the headline, “Buffy Sainte-Marie Beats Drake to Win Polaris Music Prize.” The following year, Power in the Blood won two Junos, including Aboriginal Album of the Year and Contemporary Roots Album of the Year.

In many of the write-ups, there was an almost unflattering level of surprise that, at the age of seventy-four, Sainte-Marie had made a record that sounded so urgent and contemporary. The production is part of what gives Power in the Blood vitality, but it really does come back to her power as a songwriter. In a 2015 interview with Indian Country Today, it’s easy to hear the bemusement in her words as she says, “Songwriting is a gift. I write at the same degree of excellence that I wrote in the sixties. It really surprised people—they asked ‘How can you be so young and write with such wisdom?’ Now, they ask ‘How can you be the age you are and write with such freshness?’”⁵³

As a songwriter, Sainte-Marie’s purpose is to persuade, and that has guided her through more than five decades of offering gifts of knowledge instead of lectures. “If only you knew,” her guiding principle, cushioned the sting of her message—not for her audience, but for herself, so that she could live with the crushing knowledge that most people knew but simply didn’t care about Indigenous lives, that they were neither ignorant nor naïve, but careless and complicit.

Sainte-Marie credits her mother, who passed away in 2010, for keeping kindness and possibility alive in her heart and therefore in her songs. In her darkest moments, Winnie’s unconditional love helped keep her going, and Winnie’s constant encouragement became an integral component of Sainte-Marie’s songwriting foundation.

She brought Winnie along on a few of her travels, and they went to both Hong Kong and Australia together. When Winnie and Smokey divorced, she left the East Coast and relocated to California. Winnie’s life hadn’t been easy either, which may have reinforced the bond between mother and daughter. “My mom was so sweet and so nice, and regardless of the shit that either one of us was going through in my childhood with some of the males in the family and just the fact that everything was so hushed up and laughed off, she was just personally so nice,” Sainte-Marie says.

Winnie also imparted some very specific and instructive thoughts on domesticity to her daughter. “My mom told me, ‘Don’t ever get married. You’ll just wind up chained to a sink,’” Sainte-Marie says with a laugh. “She hated housework. You know who changed my mind? Martha Stewart, because she makes homemaking so much fun, [you want to] take pride in it. I had never thought of that. When Martha Stewart came along, I started paying attention because my mom had never taught me anything—she just told me to try and escape it, which nobody can do.”

But some of Winnie’s advice stuck. Sainte-Marie has no interest in getting married again, though she absolutely adores her current partner, whom she prefers not to name. The sweetest song on Power in the Blood addresses the happiness she feels about their relationship. It’s called “Farm in the Middle of Nowhere,” and it’s heart-melting and humble at once as she sings simply, “The one I love, he loves me.” The thrice-divorced Sainte-Marie is now pretty strongly anti-marriage, particularly for women. “I didn’t do well in marriage,” she admits. “Somehow it would throw me back to my childhood days of oppression, and I would lose myself, like many other women have done.” She also cautions against the implied promise of every woman’s wedding-day dream, because the symbolism may not be enough to sustain the reality of ever-after. “I think a lot of women in the past couple hundred years have craved marriage because they finally have one occasion when they can be queen for a day,” Sainte-Marie says. “It’s the one day when everybody’s eyes are on the bride, and she gets to wear a beautiful dress and be a star and get some attention.”

She’s also had to grapple with the gendered expectations of what qualifies as “good” at family life. Sainte-Marie admits that she has had a few second thoughts about the impact of both her career and her relationships on her child over the years. First, there was the touring when Cody was a little boy.

“Cody was a real homebody and he loved living in Hawai‘i,” she says. “Even years later, he preferred to stay home rather than to travel to the mainland. My relatives in Saskatchewan and my relatives in Massachusetts were always eager to see him, but he just didn’t want to leave his friends or his stuff, or, later, his car. He came to Piapot’s when he was younger but not nearly as much as he was invited.”

But mother and son did enjoy hitting the road together on a few different occasions.

“We have had a lot of fun together,” she says. “One of the best times for me was when Cody was about fourteen and the two of us went traveling for ten days. We spent four days in New Orleans, which was a total gas for us as musicians; then the next four days at Disney World . . . Then, since he was a pretty good keyboard player by age sixteen, I took him on the road as part of my band to a bunch of rocking hot concerts in England and Norway. He loved it and has continued to play music on his own.”

Over the years, Sainte-Marie has loved watching Cody develop into an activist in his own right. “Now that he’s grown up, I’m thrilled to see his activism come into its own, especially working with his dad, Sheldon, who has been involved not only in significant actions on behalf of the Mdewakanton people in his home state of Minnesota, but also as a filmmaker alongside Steven Newcomb, with whom he produced the excellent movie The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code. Cody scored the movie at home in his own studio.”

Still, she can’t deny that she has regrets, and it’s hard not to hear the self-directed blame in her words, particularly when she’s reflecting on her choices in male partners.

“I seem to have a blind spot when it comes to men,” Sainte-Marie admits. “I just don’t see it coming, the bad stuff. When I recall the way Jack treated me and the world and Cody, too, I’m ashamed I took so long to get out of there. It was borderline unsafe, but there I was continuing to make excuses for Jack’s unforgivable rageaholic behavior. Years later, I had another boyfriend who turned out to be an intimidator—whom Cody could see more clearly than I did—and who was a con and an abuser of the support I provided to him and his family. I think I’m so afraid of male abuse that I don’t even see it. My apologies to Cody will never be enough for exposing him to those two particular bozos.”

Just like many women who have experienced violence and abuse, Sainte-Marie can be hard on herself. She has also always been the primary source of income in her relationships; she successfully raised her son as a single parent, and much later she left an abusive marriage to a musical genius. She’s been a constant source of support and inspiration to her family, her band, other musicians, and her friends, particularly the women in her life. It wasn’t at the forefront of her intentions, but simply by being herself and articulating her needs and her values, Sainte-Marie has disrupted the patriarchy over and over again. Creating something better—in spite of and beyond those hierarchal structures—is integral to decolonization, and it’s at the heart of Power in the Blood.

The album revitalized Sainte-Marie’s reputation as an activist, radical, and rabble-rouser. While she’s held up as an activist hero by a lot of people and labeled an agitator and a threat by others, she’s never thought of herself as a disruptor. It’s a credible label, given Sainte-Marie’s repeated challenges to systemic oppression and the threat she’s posed to established power dynamics throughout her life, but Sainte-Marie just laughs at the suggestion. “That’s pretty highfalutin. But I was not deliberately going up against a system and kicking at it. I was just trying to make the facts clearer. I didn’t really have an agenda to disrupt the power agenda. That’s giving me far too much credit.”

She points to some of the people at Standing Rock as better examples of political disruptors. They are on the ground, putting their bodies where their beliefs are and facing down law-enforcement agencies, water cannons, and lawyers. “I’m right with them, yes, I am, but that’s not what I was trying to do in my songs,” Sainte-Marie says. “I was trying to do something else, and it was really pretty personal. I didn’t look at Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon the way I do now, because I didn’t even know they were blacklisting me.” But, intentional or not, Sainte-Marie did change things through her music and activism by modeling Indigenous revolution in ways both big and small, loud and quiet, bold and humble. “I wasn’t trying to disrupt the power agenda,” Sainte-Marie says, “but I’m awfully glad I did.”