Feature: Buffy Sainte-Marie is light-years beyond her days as a protest singer
July 29th, 2008, 10:54 am by Jaime Galvan
By Ben Edmonds/Detroit Free Press
DETROIT — Buffy Sainte-Marie. If you’re a baby boomer, the name surely rings bells. There’s probably a picture attached, circa the early-’60s folk music explosion, of a young American Indian girl with an acoustic guitar and a strange, singular vibrato as she performs protest anthems “Universal Soldier” and “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone.” If you’re a pop scholar, you think of her as the writer of “Until It’s Time for You to Go,” a hit for both Elvis Presley and Neil Diamond, and as coauthor of the 1982 Oscar-winning song “Up Where We Belong.”
In the decades since those pictures were fixed in our consciousness, the Canadian singer and songwriter has developed parallel and equally distinguished careers as a painter, computer artist and programmer, actor (there are those who know her only from her recurring “Sesame Street” role), educator and social activist.
She attributes our incomplete and out-of-date picture to U.S. government pressure resulting from her political activism, particularly regarding American Indian issues. “I was blacklisted, taken away from American audiences in my prime,” she says, “but that didn’t stop me. I had the rest of the world and lots of creative options to explore.”
