Buffy Sainte-Marie

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/wiki/Buffy Sainte-Mariecreator

Buffy Sainte-Marie in 1968...

...and in 2019

Look right now and you will see We're only here by the skin of our teeth as it is So take heart and take care of your link with life —Buffy Sainte-Marie, "Carry It On"

Buffy Sainte-Marie (February 20, 1941 – ) is a singer-songwriter who performs in the folk, country folk, rock, and electronic genres, and is also a professional actress. She is Cree by adoption, and is a member of the Piapot First Nation; this doesn't stop both Canada and the USA claiming her as their own. Among her many honors, Buffy Sainte-Marie is the first Indigenous American / First Nations person to win an Academy Award.

She was raised in a white home, and graduated in the top ten of her class at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1964, she was adopted into the Piapot First Nation.

Then she started her singing career... which included a lot of protest songs, and lasted for only a decade in the USA until somebody (she thinks it was one or more of President Lyndon Johnson, President Richard Nixon, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, or Nashville disc jockey Ralph Emery) put her on a blacklist. While this didn't completely kill her singing career – she still got airplay in Canada – she was forced to turn to other ways to perform in order to pay the bills. She started writing songs for other musicians, and took up acting.

Then she got an invitation to appear on a new show on public broadcasting: Sesame Street. She was never a regular, but she was a regular guest throughout the second half of the 1970s... which probably (nobody's certain) makes Buffy Sainte-Marie the Trope Maker for Sesame Street Cred.

Because of that blacklist, most of Buffy Sainte-Marie's awards were given in Canada. She has been inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Order of Canada, and Canada's Walk of Fame, and along the way has been given over a dozen honorary doctorates.

She has continued her singing, songwriting, and acting careers through the 2010s. And she's never stopped singing her protest songs.

Discography:

• It's My Way! (1964)
• Many a Mile (1965)
• Little Wheel Spin and Spin (1966)
• Fire & Fleet & Candlelight (1967)
• I'm Gonna Be a Country Girl Again (1968)
• Illuminations (1969)
• She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina (1971)
• Moonshot (1972)
• Quiet Places (1973)
• Buffy (1974)
• Changing Woman (1975)
• Sweet America (1976)
• Attla: A Motion Picture Soundtrack Album (1985, with William Ackerman)
• Coincidence and Likely Stories (1992)
• Up Where We Belong (1996)
• Running for the Drum (2008)
• Power in the Blood (2015, Polaris Music Prize winner)
• Medicine Songs (2017)

Buffy Sainte-Marie provides examples of the following tropes:

• One of Us: She was using Apple computers to record her music in 1981, three years before the Macintosh debuted.
• Protest Song: So many of her songs during the 1970s – including "Universal Soldier" – were protest songs that she ended up on a blacklist. In her own words, "I was put out of business in the United States".
• Sesame Street Cred: Our trope page says she's "Perhaps the earliest Sesame example". Buffy Sainte-Marie was a recurring guest from 1975 to 1978, and it was on Sesame Street that she was shown breastfeeding her infant son, which The Other Wiki says "is believed to be the first representation of breastfeeding ever aired on television".