'Choke on your blue, white and scarlet hypocrisy!'
Native North American Child: An Odyssey
Buffy Sainte-Marie
Vanguard 79340-2
Order through CD shops that import
Review by Tom Flanagan
Buffy Sainte-Marie is possibly unique among the 1960s generation of "protest" singer-songwriters — her activism intensified as the general radicalisation subsided. For an explanation of her movement against the political ebb-tide, we need look no further than her Native American heritage and her passionate identification with the cause of her people.
Native North American Child: An Odyssey is a selection of songs released in 1974, at the end of Sainte-Marie's period at Vanguard records. It's a "best of" that leans towards her songs relating to the struggle of the Native American people. It has now been released on CD for the first time.
The album includes two previously unreleased tracks. "Isketayo Sewow (Cree Call)" points to her growing interest in traditional Native American music, an interest that later produced "Starwalker", a pow-wow chanting, foot-stomping, drum-thumping anthem of indigenous pride. "Starwalker" was dedicated to the American Indian Movement and first appeared on the album Sweet America (1976).
Born on a Cree reservation in Saskatchewan, Canada, Sainte-Marie was adopted and raised in the United States. After graduating in fine arts at the University of Massachusetts, she began performing in the early 1960s.
Her first album, It's My Way, was released in 1964. One of its tracks, "The Universal Soldier", became an anti-war standard and a
worldwide hit for Donovan in 1965. Artists who have covered Sainte-Marie's songs over the years include Barbara Streisand, Elvis Presley, Tracy Chapman and the Charlatans, to name just a few.
The most outstanding track on that first album was "Now that the
Buffalo's Gone" and set the tone for her entire career. This powerful song implores those who claim to empathise with the Native Americans to act on their feelings.
The focus of the 1964 version of the song was the building of the giant Kinzua Dam on Native American land: "A treaty forever George Washington signed ... and the treaty's being broken by Kinzua Dam ... The government now wants the Iroquois land, that of the Seneca and the Cheyenne. Its here, and its now, you must help us dear man, now that the buffalo's gone."
"Now that the Buffalo's Gone" has been recorded twice and the lyrics updated, the names of the tribes under attack change with the years but the story remains the same, as does the need for action. The 1964 version of the song is the opening track in this collection.
"He's an Indian Cowboy in the Rodeo" is a bouncing, light as a morning breeze, country-pop love song. Sainte-Marie had a rare chart success when this song topped the singles' charts in Boise, Idaho, in 1971! "Poppies", with an entirely different sound, is from Sainte-Marie's 1969 quadraphonic synthesiser album, Illuminations. It is an invitation to listen to that entire album, which will be released on CD later this year. "It's My Way" is a defiant assertion of the importance of following one's own path and being responsible for your decisions and actions.
Sainte-Marie wrote "Soldier Blue" as the title song of the ground-
breaking 1972 western of the same title that starred Candice Bergen. The movie culminates with a graphic portrayal of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre. Twenty years before Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves, and long before the US film industry was ready for it, this film portrayed the barbarity with which Native Americans were treated by the US military in its war of conquest.
Whereas the film dealt with the human suffering caused by the invading whites for the seizure of Native American, Sainte-Marie's song celebrates the beauty of the natural environment and the people's attachment to the land as a source of spiritual strength.
"I can stand upon a hill at dawn, look all around me, feel her
surround me. Soldier Blue, can't you see her life has just begun, its beating inside us, telling us she's here to guide us. Soldier Blue, Soldier Blue, can't you see that there's another way to love her."
An unexpected bonus is that the vocals are much more at the forefront of the sound compared to the original mix.
"Way, Way, Way" is another track unreleased until now. It shows another aspect of Sainte-Marie, with a rustic, rural quality given by startlingly coarse vocals.
Of all the songs written in the protest genre, "My Country 'tis of thy People, you're Dying" is surely one of the most devastating. Recorded in 1966, this compelling six-minute history lesson pulls no punches in explaining the massacres, rapes and dispossession that established the US nation state.
Songs such as this, while testimony to the talent and commitment of Sainte-Marie, have been a barrier to her wider commercial success. The US establishment is not friendly to lyrics such as: "'With our hands on our hearts, we salute you your victory. Choke on your blue, white and scarlet hypocrisy!".
While Native North American Child: An Odyssey was probably Sainte-Marie's best "best of" album, it was not her last word, musically or politically. Other milestones have been her support for the militant AIM in its fight for indigenous rights and against uranium mining in the 1970s and her taking up the cause of AIM leader Leonard Peltier, who was framed for murder by the FBI (the subject of "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee" on her 1992 album Coincidence and Likely Stories).
If you like Native North American Child, you'll find more gems on all her albums. A good place to start is It's My Way (1964), Little Wheel Spin and Spin (1966), and Up Where we Belong (1996).
These days, Sainte-Marie performs rarely, and mostly on Native American reservations. She devotes most of her energy to the Cradleboard Teaching Project, which aims to counter the Indian studies material that she discovered being presented to her son at school, which she described as "dead text about dead Indians'.
Information about the Cradleboard Teaching Project can be found at: <http://www.cradleboard.org/main.html>.