Transcript: BUFFY SAINTE-MARIE on Creative Decolonization in a Global Village /29
Ayana Young Hey For The Wild community, Ayana here. Before we begin this episode, I want to take a moment to thank our friends at Mountain Rose Herbs for supporting this podcast. Some of you may know that my journey with the show, which used to be called Unlearn and Rewild, started with my awakening to the plant world through herbalism and my first plant teacher, the late Cascade Anderson Geller. So it feels close to my heart that seven years later, Mountain Rose is by our side. Mountain Rose Herbs offers high quality, organic and sustainably harvested herbs, spices, teas, essential oils and botanical goods. Beginning in 1987 Mountain Rose Herbs made it their mission to provide plant lovers with exceptional organic botanicals harvested with the utmost respect for the places they grow and the people who grow them. Mountain Rose Herbs is generously offering for the wild listeners 10% off of their next purchase by using discount code WILD10 at checkout. You can learn about mountain rose herbs and their offerings at mountainroseherbs.com All right, now on to the show.
Welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. This week, we are rebroadcasting our interview with a For The Wild inspiration, Buffy Sainte-Marie. Initially released in November of 2015 in this conversation, Buffy and I explore how we can cultivate creativity and global awareness. We hope you enjoyed this special encore episode.
Ayana Young Hello, my name is Ayana Young and I welcome you to Unlearn and Rewild. Today, we are speaking with the legendary artist educator and political activist Buffy Sainte-Marie. Buffy was born to Cree parents on the Piapot Reservation in Saskatchewan, Canada. She was orphaned as an infant and moved to Massachusetts, where she would later get her degree in Eastern Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts. In the early 60s, Buffy played the coffee houses of Greenwich Village, where her music was so well received that her career skyrocketed to international fame soon thereafter. Almost 50 years after the release of her first album, It's My Way. Buffy's new album, Power in the Blood is filled with the same fierce messages, eclecticism and compassion unique to this unstoppable woman.
Hello, Buffy. We are beyond blessed to have you on the show. Welcome!
Buffy Sainte-Marie Good, good, good. I love your title. It's so good. Unlearn and Rewild, perfect!
Ayana Young You are an extremely creative person. Not only are you a musician and a poet in many different genres, from rock and roll to protest music to love songs, but you're a painter as well. I've heard you talk about how everyone has their own creative talent to share, but often, as children, we're put into schools that squelch that creativity. So in these times of judgmental influence and distraction, how can we foster creativity at every age? And secondly, for the artist in the audience, how can we authentically share our art without falling into the trap of capitalist commodification and fetishism found in the art world, which you've been able to do so beautifully.
Buffy Sainte-Marie I don't know how well I've been able to do it, but I hear you. It's definitely out there. And you're right. I think just about everybody is born talented and I don't think it's just the schools that discourage talent. I think it's parents and advertising and cartoons and just about everything, you know. And I think all of this comes back to...I mean, my belief is the best things in life are free, like breastfeeding. You know, there's nobody making any money off it. Therefore it's not in your face all the time in the media and in schools and in parental concerns, and we're just living in a time where merchants are the kings. That's what we're experiencing in our contemporary life, is that money rules and coins, and it's a big Monopoly game. And we kind of know it, but we look the other way because we say, Oh no, it's probably just my own paranoia. No, it's really out there. It seems, history is cyclical, and sometimes it was the church that were running things, and other times it was the Inquisition, or in India, sometimes it would be the merchant class. And I have a degree in Oriental Philosophy, so I always come back to that when I'm thinking about our contemporary times, how just merchants, coins, merchandising, more more, more money, exponential growth. It's a crock, but it's a meme of our lives.
And yet, on the other hand, if you take any group of kids to the beach when they're four or five, they all make art, even though their parents probably don't even recognize it as art because the parents are up there sitting on the blanket, you know, talking to each other and eating chips and thinking about their own daily struggles. But here are all these kids and they're using their imaginations and they're making pictures and they're dancing, and nobody told them how. They're hearing songs in their head. They're making sculptures. We don't call it sculpture, we call it sand castles, but they're thinking about architecture, and they're using their imaginations, and they're making up characters, you know, every day. They're making up dramas and stories. This is so creative. And I guess, you know, you want to know how to foster creativity at every age–what I tell people is, number one, don't discourage your kids by distracting them to anything that's going to take them, you know, to make them think that their creativity isn't of equal value. I think the most valuable thing we have is our originality and our creativity. But you know, kids get distracted because of what their parents like to do, you know, sports or, you know, money, or, I don't know, a social life. Yet this creativity, I don't think we lose it. I think we retain it even as adults. Just go into a room...Go to the store and buy four or five small canvases and some acrylic paint, and put the different colors of paint, you know, onto a plate or something, and then go into a room and turn the lights almost all the way down so you can't really see what you're painting and just throw the paint up there. That's true creativity. That's fun. That's discovery. That's being a bored child who's going to find something to do with these paints or crayons or whatever you got. And I think that that spark of creativity, once an adult remembers it, can really fill your life with a creative joy that you thought was impossible.
Ayana Young I resonate with that a lot. You know, reawakening that creative spark that might be lying dormant but isn't gone,
Buffy Sainte-Marie Yeah, I don't think it's ever gone. You know, I suppose, you know, like puppies and kittens, there's a certain learning period when it's easiest for us to come up with that kind of stuff. But I don't know, try it. But, you know, you also asked about, you know, how do you share your art without being totally commodified and, you know, selling out? I think in my own case, I just do what I want to do. I never expected to be a success at anything. I got out of college, and I thought I was going to India to continue my studies. I had a degree in Oriental Philosophy, but I stopped in Greenwich Village just to, you know, see if anybody wanted to hear these songs I was writing all my life and that I'd sung to my college dorm mates in college and little coffee houses, and all of a sudden I had a career. So I was quite surprised by it. So it's not as though I looked forward all my life to becoming a professional artist. I mean, that's really how to get commodified. And I just kind of lucked into it. I just got lucky with things that came very natural to me. So if you are an original, I think the thing to do is to treasure that. And I think I've always thought very differently from my peers and from managers and agents and record companies. They were all chasing whatever last month hit one. Oh, sing like Madonna. Sing like, you know, Brittany. Sing like somebody else.
But to me, the only reason for getting on a stage in the first place in my own personal life was that I wanted to demo the songs. I would have loved it if somebody else could have done that and I could have gone to India, but I was the only one who had the songs, and I thought the songs were valuable. So that's where I was coming from. I was coming from not "I want to be a singer because I like pretty dresses and makeup and want to be on TV." It was, "I'm a songwriter. How can I get these messages out?" And so as a little more like a journalist than a pop star, and I'm very surprised that I've had as much success as I've had. I think you just do it. You know, you just do it. Whatever it is that is original to you. Don't....That's why you're there. Is your originality, not how well you can sing, you know, the latest top 20.
Ayana Young Yeah, it's that leap of faith, allowing that pure passion to bubble to the surface. I feel that a lot in my life.
Buffy Sainte-Marie Yeah, do you?
Ayana Young Yeah, I do. I, you know, I just leap not knowing what the outcome will be.
Buffy Sainte-Marie Yeah, like a child, like a kid, who’s...You know how sometimes a child will really need to be heard, and they'll have an idea, and they just talk over you and and they really need to be heard, or they're coloring their pictures and they don't want to be interrupted, or they're making their music and they're really, really happy. Nobody has to tell them. Nobody had to tell them how because they're playing. So I'm a big believer that creativity in the first place, it begins with play. So if you're attracted to do something, you know you want to be a writer, a journalist, a blogger, a painter, a dancer, whatever it is. If you're attracted to it, that's your fuel. That's your real fuel – is your own attraction to it. If you don't want to do it, don't go become a bean counter. It's okay. There's a lot of beans out there that need counting. But if you have something original that you love to do, oh, give other people a chance to see that and not so that you'll have a career, but because that's the only contribution we have, is our originality, I think.
Ayana Young Your excitement about this current movement towards global awareness when you came out with the song, “Now That the Buffalo are Gone” in 1964 and “My Country Tis of Thy People You're Dying” in 1966, it was shocking. It was shocking not only because you were speaking about the genocide of Indigenous people that was being ignored and hidden from the mainstream, but speaking out as an Indigenous person and a woman nonetheless was unheard of. So even though there is this growing awareness that Native Americans were murdered and their land stolen and their children stolen from them and sent away to residential schools, there are still injustices burdening native communities today. For example, the uranium mining or the tar sands in Alberta, Canada. What are some tangible solutions towards justice for Native people, and how do people of different races work through intergenerational trauma and become allies towards a restorative future?
Buffy Sainte-Marie Wow, that was kind of a bunch of a bunch of questions, and they were all good. I don't know where to start, no. Good questions. Good questions, very good. I would agree with you, you know, in saying that awareness alone about Native issues isn't a nosh, you know, what can we actually do? There's a lot that we can do, but I don't think that it's the kind of "what you can" do that your parents and teachers would give you as an assignment. So I'm not going to do that because I think each person's life is different, and I think every day we have an opportunity to make something better. And if you're thinking about it like that, it automatically crosses racial lines anyway because if you're making things better, in my opinion, you're making things better for everybody. If you make things better for Aboriginal people, you're basically on the level of fairness and correcting injustices. That's good for everybody. So in the first place you want to get out of the race box. I have a strange life, you know, I'm in the big cities one day, operating at a very high level. Other times, I'm lost in a city nobody knows who I am and I'm just wandering around the streets. Other times, I'm out at some reserve or an Indigenous area in Scandinavia or Australia or something. So I get to see a lot of ways to do things, and I'm aware that people have different languages and different styles, and people are at different degrees of ripeness. So when I'm trying to do something through a song or a painting or something, I really know all these people. You know, they are actually a part of my day to day history. I've been with them. I know them. And so just the idea of communicating as an artist to the whole wide world, you do it in a way that's very much a parallel to 'think globally, act locally.' And what I try to do is everything I can when something comes up, you know. I try to be able to, you know...I see some place that needs a check, or that needs some money, or need some advice, or different needs come up every day and you address them as you can. But as a singer in a big concert, or a global person writing something, then I want to be kind of like a folk song in that it's going to last for generations and cross language barriers and country barriers. Actually, I'm singing or writing for the individual in each person. I'm only singing to one person that I'm not singing to 120,000 people all at the same time even though that's the reality of who shows up, I'm still singing to the eachness of each person, the person that is similar to me inside or different to me inside.
So it's funny how...I think that's what artists do. I think that's one of the characteristics of the work of many artists, you know, from you know, if you want to think about, you know, white folks art, think about the Renaissance. The sculptures and the paintings, some of them kind of don't travel out of 15th century Italy, and others of them really do. And I think that if you look at the world kindly and you look at history kindly, and when you're thinking about artists, many artists have managed to reach both the global and the individual in whatever their work is. And I think I've gotten lucky with a few songs that did that, you know, whether they were simple love songs or, you know, songs that address war and peace, or real complicated issues, like, My Country Tis of Thy People You're Dying. And you are right, that was the first time that the word genocide was used by an artist in describing North America. That's real important. You know, I rewrote that song. I rewrote it recently for truth and reconciliation in Canada. I kind of localized it to Canadian issues, but it's basically the same thing. Are you aware of the Doctrine of Discovery, by the way?
Ayana Young You read my mind, I was just about to ask you about the Doctrine of Discovery because I listened to a lecture you gave at Arizona State University where you explained that this genocide of native people didn't stem from racism, but rather colonialism.
Buffy Sainte-Marie Yeah. You know, some of the questions that you're asking, it kind of all can go back to the Doctrine of Discovery, and I'm with a lot of non-Indian people with good hearts who ask, "How could my ancestors ever have done this?" And they feel terribly guilty and quite challenged and confused as to how it could have happened. And if you go back to the Doctrine of Discovery...The Doctrine of Discovery was put together in the 15th century with several overdubs by several popes, but it was done during the Inquisition. I mean, that's a very important point. The indigenous people of the world were discovered by colonials during the Inquisition. Do you realize what white people were doing to white people in those days? So for me, it's a very informative and somewhat comforting in-a-funny-way thought, to realize that the cruelties of the 15th century that came around the globe and wiped out indigenous people legally because they had not already been Christianized by some Christian power.
The Doctrine of Discovery said that if European explorers were exploring and came across a piece of land that was inhabited that if the people were not Christian, they were not supposed to be treated as human. They were supposed to be enslaved or destroyed or converted. But in any case, the racket said that they were to be controlled and exploited by the people who were running the church, who, in my mind, were not Christians. That was Christendom. Christendom is the racket that racketeers make out of, you know, the teachings of Jesus has nothing to do with the teaching of Jesus. It's just another racket, and it's been going on since before the Old Testament, and that's what happened to indigenous people.
So if we remember that the Doctrine of Discovery is still in effect in both the United States and Canada and Johnson versus Macintosh, which is a law, it has been quoted during the last 10 years. So don't think that the Doctrine of Discovery, which gives colonialism from Europe the legal upper hand to enslave, to exploit, to extract natural resources, everything. It's all based in this stupid thing that needs to be expunged. So you know, of course, we're working we're hoping that Pope Francis might be the one to finally expunge this. But who knows whether it happens or not, the good news about the bad news is that more people are starting to understand the position of Indigenous people throughout the world, because we're exposing the Doctrine of Discovery to ordinary moms and pops.
And it helps to answer that question, how could my ancestors have done that? They were forced to do it. Henry the Eighth was making business deals with the church at the same time as the Doctrine of Discovery. He went along with the Doctrine of Discovery because it was a business deal for him. He had to seem as though he were on the side of the political Church of the time. So the laws of the Doctrine of Discovery was very powerful in Spain, in Italy, in the Netherlands, in France, in Portugal, and in England. And those were the laws that were operative when Columbus was out sailing the ocean blue, and Cabot and Cartier and the rest of them were claiming Indigenous land for the crowns and churches of Europe. So I think that if people know that there's a lot of forgiveness and understanding of just the boneheadedness and the racketeering of those far away times, and it also gives people somewhere to go with it. Let's do away with the Doctrine of Discovery. Let's discuss it. Let's see some eyebrows go up. "Oh, I never knew that." You know, to me, it's all good.
Ayana Young Yeah, absolutely incredible to view it through that lens and work through it. And I'm wondering how you move through your feelings about the government, especially after they blacklisted you from reaching people with your messages of truth? How do you think the millennial generation can engage in proactive relationship with the government in these times of disruption and distrust?
Buffy Sainte-Marie One of the reasons for disruption and distrust is because we keep using the word 'the government.' It's not the government. The United States government didn't blacklist me. They didn't pass an act of Congress saying "Buffy's music socks, or Buffy's music is too radical, or she tells the truth too..." None of that. No, it's not the government. And people will sometimes say, well, didn't that make you hate the United States? No, and doesn't Harper make you hate Canada? No, no. What we elect is an administration. It's a handful of cronies. No matter how you look at it, that's what it is. It's a handful of guys, and they are hell bent for success according to whatever, whatever they're going for. It's usually money and power. It's not the government. It's an administration. And with Lyndon Johnson, who was a Democrat and Richard Nixon, who was a Republican, each of them had guys in the back room making nasty phone calls. That's how it's done. It's not the government.
So the Millennials—don't be afraid of these people who come on as if they're cobras. They're not. They're little worms. They do nasty little things. They do things like, you know, like some teenage girl movie. It's really nasty, you know. It's word of mouth and it's personal networking. It's a good old boy thing, but it's not Canada, and it's not America, and they only last for a few years. Then we throw those rascals out and we elect somebody else. I hope that that's helpful in people demythologizing "the government." The government is us. We elect somebody and then our lamest reaction is to elect somebody, give him the keys to the cash register and power, and then forget about him. It's too tempting. That's how politicians turn into racketeers. The game is kind of fixed, and what we need to do is vote, you know, elect, and follow up. But you got to keep on. You got to keep the pressure on. You know, we think that we roll stops when we vote. But no, it doesn't, unfortunately.
Ayana Young Many well meaning non Native people romanticize Indigeneity. I heard an interview that you once said that people wanted you to come on stage as some Pocahontas figure earlier in your career. But you have shattered a one dimensional perception of yourself and embody so many dimensions as artist, musician, teacher, philosopher, activist, farmer. So in these times of great displacement, whether from land or ancestry, what does it mean to be Indigenous in today's world? And do you think that people can grow to be indigenous to land that they don't historically come from?
Buffy Sainte-Marie I think people can be, can become something like indigenous. But no, I don't know. You know, I think we're kind of stretching the definition of indigenous a little too far. We need a different word, and I can't come up with it right now. I think that you can become effective, and you could become a supporter of the Indigenous people who happen to come from there. But you know, there are a lot of ramifications to identity, including an Indigenous identity. I mean, if you marry an Indigenous person, and you know, you've been married and raising a family for 40 years, you're pretty much a member of the group. So, I'm not going to worry about the definition so much. Truly Indigenous people who come from colonized nations. I mean, now we're starting to define it a little more. You know, truly Indigenous, you know, like Aboriginal people from Australia, who are unfortunately sitting on the only land to which they have title and it has uranium. I mean, they're screwed, you know, because they're Indigenous. Now, if they had grown up in families, in colonized families...How you grow up is very, very important as to your world view and your effectiveness in the world, in both show business and what we're talking about now, you know contemporary issues of Indigeneity.
Because, like when I first went to Greenwich Village, I had never met a businessman. I had never met a lawyer. I was dealing with people who, for generations had been colonial racketeers. I mean, I would call them colonial racketeers. Other people would just say that they were very good at the profit motive, but they knew how to exploit. They knew how to steal. They knew all about payola. They, in other words, they were networked, and Indigenous people traditionally are not. So there's a lot to be said for in contrast between someone who is coming from a non business family, like myself and most indigenous families would be coming from non business families. We don't know the rules of the game. It's like walking into a Vegas casino. You've never been there, the deck is stacked against you, and you're going to lose because it's a setup. It's meant to exploit you. It's not meant to be fair. It's a game to some people, you know, who grow up like that. The whole idea of colonialism is, I mean, my motto, Stay Calm and Decolonize. We're all living in this colonial ever ripening, ever changing...Would you call it like a hallucination? I mean money itself is a hallucination of itself. It has no value. You know?
Ayana Young Yeah, people are traveling across the globe at such speed these days and moving from countryside to city, and it's like a diaspora of sorts.
Buffy Sainte-Marie It kind of is, but that's not necessarily all bad. See, I think travel is good for anybody, and I'm really happy with certain Canadian reserves whereby they take the junior and senior classes traveling to places like Africa and New Zealand, and, you know. They take them to other Indigenous areas to see the world through other Indigenous eyes, and how wonderful that is. In my own case, even though I come from a heartfelt position of Indigeneity, I love the big world too, and I have certainly profited in both the brain, the heart, pockets, everything by traveling. It's fun, it makes you smarter. And yet our reserves in Canada, especially in my own family, the people who stayed on the reserves are very, very dear to us. They haven't had travel and we have, but they have had community life in a very special way too, which they, you know, hopefully they share with us. So I like it all. I say travel as much as you can, learn, as much as you can read, as much as you can, listen to all the music you know. Who knows we might only live once.
Ayana Young I love your spirit and non judgmental, non shaming, openness to the world.
Buffy Sainte-Marie Thank you.
Ayana Young And I'm wondering, because of your connection to your ancestral cosmology and beliefs, and because you studied Eastern philosophy, I'm wondering, what are some of the most powerful spiritual wisdoms or takeaways that help guide you to live your life so fully?
Buffy Sainte-Marie You know, there's not one single thing that I would mention. Oriental Philosophy, what it got me was, ah, big smile, because I was so thrilled to know that other people besides myself loved the Creator. That's what...When I discovered Oriental Philosophy, it showed me that minds were greater than what I was finding in my own little neighborhood. I found Oriental philosophy when I was in high school, and there wasn't anybody who had ever heard the word reincarnation. Not that I believe in it. I don't. But after the Beatles came along, there was a big fad for people to study pseudo Hinduism. So I've kind of seen it come and go.
So when I learned from studying all these religions was that you know what originality in how you perceive the Creator comes directly from your circumstances, of where you live on the planet and who you ran into, and what you read and all of that, but all these people agree that we are continually ripening. And if I have a religion or a spiritual or, you know, kind of heartfelt concept to impart to people that kind of comes from this area of my brain, it's that we're ripening. It's like it says in my song, “We Are Circling.” And what it implies, and “Carry It On” that other song that's also on Power in the Blood, which is my new album, it has to do with ripening. We are ripening, ripening together—babies, elders, bozos and angels. This is how we grow. This is how we get to know. And I think that every single one of us, even the people we don't like, is whether we like it or not, evolving, getting better, learning. We're all different, and we're all starting each one from our own original place, and we all go at different rates. But I don't think any of us is very ripe. I think if you say that, you know I have a positive attitude and a humility is because I I think that we're all really kindergarten babies on this planet. I think we're just beginning. And just like a second grader will look down his nose at a first grader and say, "Awww, she spills her milk, I don't," right? Or the first grader will look down her nose at a kindergarten kid and say, "Ewww, they wet their pants. I don't you." You know, we're always looking down our noses at somebody who's five minutes younger than we are, and there's no profit in it at all. You might as well realize that. You know, we're all evolving, and it's very exciting. Mine is and yours is, and so is even that going neither one of us likes, I don't know. I just think that's the reality of life, and that being the case, it doesn't pay to put your nose too far in the air.
Ayana Young I'd like to end this conversation by asking you about your new album, Power in the Blood. What are you wanting to inspire in people who engage with your music?
Buffy Sainte-Marie The whole song “We Are Circling,” to me, is like a mantra. It's like a deliberate mantra. It's real simple, but I don't know. It's what I really mean and what I really say. You know, I tried to kind of make those little pearls of wisdom stickable, especially in a little campfire song like that, you know. And the idea of, you know, I really believe in the positivity that's coming through in the songs, but I also also, clearly do see some of the negative portraits that I present in songs, and none of it's deliberate. It's just kind of the way I see it, and what's happening in my own daily life. I mean, I'll go through an airport, and all kinds of things will happen. There'll be all kinds of joys and bummers. You know, every five minutes is something new. You know, you see somebody who you wish you could know, and then you see somebody, and you hope you don't sit next to them. And sure enough, you do, and it turns out you have things in common. So I don't know. Life's a trip. You think I would have come up with something better than that in the last 50 years, but keep your nose on the joy trail and share what you can share when you can share it. And don't be afraid to take a bath and take a nap and don't burn out. You know, that's kind of my advice, very, very easy when you really do care, and when your eyes are being open to some of the justices and injustices of the world. It's really tempting to just have an emotional reaction and burn out and then go nowhere. No, no, your observations are probably true. You know, go slow and careful if you really care. Come up with a little strategy of how you can be happy and share that happiness and make things better for yourself and others. It's really a lot of fun.
Ayana Young Well, Buffy, thank you so much for your time, your wisdom and your spirit. You are in the truest sense, an inspiration and it's exhilarating to hear you speak. So thank you again for being on Unlearn and Rewild.
Buffy Sainte-Marie Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure, Ayana. And again, congratulations on your great title, Unlearn and Rewild. I'm going to be thinking about that.
Ayana Young Well, wonderful.
Buffy Sainte-Marie And I got one for you, Stay calm and Decolonize.
Ayana Young I'm keeping to that.
Buffy Sainte-Marie Okay, have a great day
Ayana Young Enjoy our day, Buffy, thank you again.
Buffy Sainte-Marie Thank you. Bye.
Ayana Young Thank you for listening to Unlearn and Rewild. This is Ayana Young. The music you heard today was all by Buffy Sainte-Marie. The songs included "Native North American Child," "Little Wheel, Spin and Spin," "My Country Tis of Thy People, You're Dying," "Generation Carry it On," God is Alive," "Magic is Afoot," and "We Are Circling." Our theme music is "Like a River" by Kate Wolf. And, thank you to our editor, Nicole West, and producer March Young.