150+ Canadians Day 27: Buffy Sainte-Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie contributes to peace through her artistic and educational activities, advocating for human rights and against war.#Canada150

In 1997 she founded the Cradleboard Teaching Project, an educational curriculum devoted to better understanding Native Americans. She has won recognition and many awards and honours for both her music and her work in education and social activism.

Sainte-Marie has claimed that at one time she had been blacklisted by American radio stations and that she, along with Native Americans and other native people in the Red Power movements, were put out of business in the 1970s.

In a 1999 interview, Sainte-Marie said, “I found out 10 years later, in the 1980s, that President Lyndon B. Johnson had been writing letters on White House stationery praising radio stations for suppressing my music. … In the 1970s, not only was the protest movement put out of business, but the Native American movement was attacked.”  In 2015, Sainte-Marie released the album Power in the Blood on True North Records. She had a television appearance on May 22, 2015 with Democracy Now! to discuss the record and her musical and activist career. On September 21, 2015, Power in the Blood was named the winner of the 2015 Polaris Music Prize

Most recently, Buffy Sainte-Marie took to the studio with Inuit singer Tanya Tagaq for a Polaris Collaboration Session. A studio performance video of “You Got To Run (Spirit Of The Wind)” is available for viewing on the Polaris Music Prize YouTube channel. An interview with Buffy and Tanya discussing the collaboration on the latest episode of the Polaris Podcast.