The TIME LINE Part 2 of Beverley Jean Santamaria a.k.a. Buffy Sainte-Marie (1965 - 1970)
January 01, 1965
With the compliments of:
December 28, 1968
1969 -
Indius Alvarez and Cree Indian folk-singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, at the Cloisters museum.
January 03, 1965
Asbury Park Press Newspaper, Page 32
January 07, 1967
The News (Kalispell, Montana) Newspaper, Page 06
January 24, 1964
To Tell the Truth (CBS)
PANEL: Tom Poston, Peggy Cass, Orson Bean, Kitty Carlisle
CONTESTANT #1: Buffy Sainte-Marie (Folk singer)
CONTESTANT #2: Norma Bidwell (Chef who cooks on the hood of a car)
CONTESTANT #3: Robert Surface (Submarine captain)
Where are you (Buffy) from? Answer: "Massachusetts".
When did you (Buffy) move to the United States? "Well, I was adopted when I was about four months old".
January 24, 1965
The Portland (Maine) Press Herald Sunday Telegram Newspaper, Page 4-C
By William Wolf
Buffy Sainte-Marie Notes Ties With Maine
NEW YORK - "Make up a song, Buffy," the other youngsters would say when Buffy Sainte-Marie was growing up in Naples, Maine.
And the girl of Cree Indian origin would oblige with songs about the people and events she knew, such as the time a boy's boat sank in the middle of Sebago Lake.
Buffy is one of the most talked about new artists in the folk singing field. Her rich haunting voice and passionate singing style made good use of material stemming from her life's experiences and a strong affinity with her Indian heritage.
Listening to her record album, one would think of her as being in her thirties.
But Buffy is a zestful 22 years of age, and a person whose mature reflections about life are wrapped in unbridled enthusiasm for living.
“I compose my own songs,” she says. She has just concluded the most recent leg of her almost perpetual travels around the country to give concerts and appear in coffee houses. Everything is on the upbeat for Buffy at the moment. She is recording a second album for Vanguard, and a number of top television shows have been negotiated for her services.
SUDDENLY, LEADING PEOPLE in the folk field want to know more about this dark-haired, dark-eyed performer, and are intrigued with her background and the story of her development as an important new find.
Buffy never knew her real parents, although she knows they were Cree. She was adopted as an infant by Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sainte-Marie, whom she has always regarded as her parents. Albert Sainte-Marie is a refrigeration mechanic in Wakefield, Massachusetts.
“Our home is both in Wakefield and at Naples, where we have a trailer with a homemade porch that my Dad built,” says Buffy.
“It’s at the rear of property owned by friends who have let us use the land rent-free for many years. We have also lived in Liberty, Maine, and spent a good many summers in the woods. If I had my own way, that’s how I’d like to live all the time.”
BUFFY SAYS HER ADOPTIVE parents are part Micmac Indian, but that she was raised “like all the other kids around,” in a non-Indian situation. Her summers were spent in Maine and her schooling was in Wakefield where she attended junior high school and Wakefield High. She graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1962, and also took courses at Smith, Holyoke, Amherst and Leslie Colleges.
Now she has another home – on the Canadian Cree reservation at Craven, Saskatchewan. She is there now for a month and has spent whatever time she can there since a Cree family adopted her and the tribe took her in as a member in a legal ceremony.
“Once I’m at the reserve, you can’t reach me,” she stresses. “There is a no phone. It’s rural and very poor.”
MENTION OF THE WAY Indians live evokes a sadness in Buffy’s eyes. Active in Indian Affairs, she is indignant at the treatment she feels her people have received in the United States over the years, and she sings of their land being taken away to this very day. In fact, the chief problem in arranging TV appearances, she said, is that the big shows consider some of her material controversial and would prefer to dictate what she would sing.
“Nobody will tell me what to sing,” says Buffy adamantly. She is confident everything will work out in due time, just as she too her time signing with a recording company. “I’m a contract reader,” she notes. “I wouldn’t sign until I was sure I had the right contract.”
Buffy never took music lessons. She learned to play the guitar by herself, and she has worked out her own fingered method.
Other performers are amazed at her unusual arrangements and chords,” she recalls “and I would always compose. When I was four years old mother bought a piano and learn to play by myself.”
HER FIRST PROFESSIONAL work was in a coffee house in Springfield, Massachusetts, where she soon developed a loyal following. One day, after she finished a course at Leslie College, she decided to try New York.
“I just left,” Buffy relates, “I arrived at the Y.M.C.A. and asked a cab driver where Greenwich Village was. Someone had told me to sing at hootenannies in the village, and I started a few. People got excited. I was in New York only two days, and when I went back to Massachusetts I began receiving all kinds of offers to perform.”
That was it. There has never been a letup. She has traveled throughout the United States and Canada, and has tour booked for Europe.
At school she majored in oriental studies, sings some songs in Hindu, and would like to study in India. She speaks Spanish and French as well as Cree.
BUFFY STILL IS unaccustomed to the world of publicity. Recently LOOK magazine did a spread on her and she is still upset over a reference on her and she is still upset over a reference to her having been “hooked on codeine.” The story goes on to explain what happened, but Buffy fears people will regard her as a drug addict.
She says:
“When I was sick in Florida, I went to a doctor who started giving me prescriptions. I had no idea what I was taking. While traveling, I sudden became ill and I didn’t know why. A friend took the prescription to a druggist, who was astonished at the dosage and said I had been taking codeine.
“My friends locked me in a room until it was all over. There has never been another problem since I have no desire to experiment with drugs and never had.”
Characteristically, Buffy has drawn on her experience to create a poignant song about addiction. It’s called “Cod’ine” and is in her album, “It’s My Way.”
February 1965 –
The song “Many a Mile” sung by Buffy Sainte-Marie, which was written by her friend, Patrick Sky.
During the summer, Buffy Sainte-Marie took off for three months, after her European tour, going to a small island off the coast of Spain, without telling anyone. Though she agreed to send 3 telegrams at regular intervals. The first, merely announcing that she was still alive; the second, whether she intended to resume her singing career; and the third, to inform where to send tickets for her airfare home. The Spaniards assumed she was a gypsy.
February 11, 1965
The Toronto Star Newspaper, Page 24
😂😂😂😂
The other name she was born with was: Beverley Jean Santamaria
Born: February 20, 1941 in Stoneham, Middlesex County, MA
Birth Parents: Albert Cicero Santamaria & Winifred Irene (nee: Kenrick)
Wait, I read before that upon graduation, heading to New York City she was going to fly to India?
April 11, 1965
The Oakland Tribune Newspaper, Page 10EN
Buffy Sainte-Marie's main appeal may be her Cree Indian parentage, because her traditional folk choices here show neither vocal nor musical prowess.
April 24, 1965
The Windsor Star Newspaper, Page 27
By Nanci Lugsdin
Singer Scorns Ideal Gimmick
"It's the breaks of the game," she said with a smile more rueful than bitter.
"Most people treat folksinging like freaks and Indians like Pocahontas, and I happen to be both."
The speaker was Buffy Sainte-Marie, a folksinger with an unusual problem. In show business, where gimmicks sell singers more surely than talent does, Buffy has an ideal "gimmick." She is a North American Indian, born a Plains Cree in Saskatchewan but raised by Micmacs in the state of Maine.
But she hates the label 'Cree Indian folksinger'.
"I don't sing Cree Indian folksongs," she points out. "And I don't want people paying money to see an Indian."
"Who I am is not an Indian," Buffy explains carefully, "and the reason I sing is not because I am an Indian."
May 1965
Stanhope House, Stanhope Place, London, W2
Record Information
BUFFY SAINTE-MARIE
Buffy Sainte-Marie who, at the age of 21, has become one of the best known folk singers in America, is of American Indian descent and is an adopted member of the Cree tribe. She was born in Maine and raised in Wakefield, a suburb of Boston.
She was at the University of Massachusetts, majoring in elementary education and Oriental philosophy when she became interested in folk music and learned to play the guitar. In three weeks she was singing publicly but soon realized the limitations of singing other people's songs, and started composing her own. Now she has over 200 to her credit, many of which depict her own personal observations and experiences.
Her unique style is composed of many influences - a hint of the blues, a trace of Indian song, a touch of French chanson and even a bit of ragtime.
She aims her songs not only at adults but also writes specifically for young people and part of her programme for children includes a musical version of Eugene Field's poem "Winkin, Blinkin and Nod." She also tells youngsters stories of the Indians and shows them authentic American Indian arts and crafts.
After graduation Buffy went to New York to try her luck as a professional singer. A club called The Bitter End she sang three numbers and the offers started coming in. She had four recording companies after her signature, was approached to sing on radio and was booked to appear in New York Folk Clubs.
Her name has become popularized more through personal recommendation than a regular publicity programme. For instance, once, when she was was appearing in Cleveland, she broke all attendance records during during her three week booking and was held over another fortnight. The house record was broken for each of the five weeks at a time when there was a newspaper strike in Cleveland and consequently her only publicity was by word-of-mouth.
In June 1965, Buffy made her first tour of Britain where she also appeared on television. Her first Fontana record release in this country was an LP "It's My Way" (TFL.6040) and to coincide with her visit a single, "Until It's Time For You To Go" / "The Flower and the Apple Tree" (TF.574) was issued.
With the compliments of:
Brian Mulligan, Press Officer, Phillips Record Limited.
Ambassador 7788
May 12, 1965
American Folk Musician Patrick Sky in Greenwich Village
(Photo by David Gahr/Getty Images)
NEW YORK - MAY 12: American singer songwriter, folk musician, guitarist, producer, and accomplished builder and player of the Irish uilleann pipes, Patrick Sky poses for a portrait on May 12, 1965, in Greenwich Village in New York City, New York. Patrick Sky is of Irish and Creek Indian descent. Patrick Sky was a seminal figure, along with Eric Anderson and Buffy Sainte-Marie, in the folk music revival in the mid-1960s. Notably, Patrick Sky produced recordings by the legendary and aging blues guitarist and singer Mississippi John Hurt, newly rediscovered by the folk world and unrecorded since a heyday in the 1920s, for Vanguard Records.
June 1965
Scott Santamaria was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, to his parents, Edmund Paul "Eddie" Santamaria and Barbara Lorraine (nee: Rotcavich)
July 21, 1965
The Broadside Volume IV, No. 11 Cambridge, Massachusetts
Festival Field Newport: Folk Music and Coffee House News (.25cents)
Folk music and the Paternity Suit
By Dave Van Ronk
Broadly speaking, American folk music is a product of two distinct but interrelated realities: slavery and the frontier.
Pat Sky has been singing, playing, and composing since childhood. Partly of Creek and Cherokee ancestry, Pat was born in Georgia and raised near the LaFouche Swamps of Louisiana. A little over a year ago, he moved to Greenwich Village and began building a reputation there as a folksinger and composer - a reputation which quickly spread through folk centers in other cities.
Though Pat's music consists primarily of blues and ballads of his own composition, he also includes in his repertoire many of the songs he learned from his grandparents during his childhood. His first album, on Vanguard, was just recently released.
SEE (above) May 27, 1964, The Broadside, Volume III, No. 7, Cambridge, Massachusetts
August 29, 1965
September 24, 1965
The Wakefield Daily Item Newspaper, Page 07
“Once Over Lightly” by “The Egghead”
EGGHEAD’S MUSIC BEAT … That song, “Universal Soldier,” that is climbing on Boston charts – the one by Glen Campbell – was written by none other than Wakefield’s Buffy St. Marie, who graduated from Wakefield High in 1958. Miss St. Marie, from Prospect Street, has a rising career as a folksinger herself, in addition to all of the songs she has sold to other artists … Why is it that “answer” records are never as good as the originals? Maybe it’s because we get used to the original and the answer sounds like a cheap imitation.
October 09, 1965
The Ottawa Citizen Newspaper, Page 03
October 16, 1965
The Ottawa Journal Newspaper, Page 13
October 26, 1965
December 10, 1965
LIFE Magazine, Pages 53-54
Versatility of a Cree Indian singer: Buffy’s Many Voices
Buffy Sainte-Marie is a full-blooded Cree Indian who is one-sixth folk singer. When she plays her primitive mouth bow, and sings Cripple Creek, she sounds like a 100% one. (Buffy must have terminated her relationship with Patrick Leon Lynch a.k.a. Patrick Sky previous to go to Spain)
With her boyfriend, Indius Alvarez, a vagabond artist, she placed a bouquet on the tomb effigy of a 13th Century Knight at the Cloisters Museum in New York. Buffy said the figure reminded her of her song, “The Universal Soldier.”
December 10, 1965
Time Magazine, Page 62
December 12, 1965
Card Letter Communication from Buffy Sainte-Marie to Beatrice Loretta (Santamaria) & her husband George Andrew (“Andy”) Anderson
It was very kind of you to write and I am sure enjoyed hearing from you, having waited for your letter since Daddy [Albert] told me in his letter you might write. It has taken a few days for my letters to be forwarded to me by my manager. Since this card is too little write big and too pretty not to use, I’ll write very tiny and ask your patience. Perhaps Grammy & Grandpa or Arthur told you I’d phoned at Thanksgiving. I hope the day was warm for you and that my thoughts for all of you were somehow near. I’m sure you all are unsure as to whether or not I “know what I’m doing,” and I thank you for your faith in me, as it’s good work I’m doing, though it is exhausting in every way. Today is cold and rainy and the wind is like a knife. I went to Mass and got very lonesome for the “Sunday paper and home-cooked meal” of long ago. But I spent the day in my room writing and organizing my paperwork and feel as though I got something accomplished in the way of completing a song for my new album, which I hope to have released in February, and which will probably be my strongest and best to date, although it’s going to make a lot of people uneasy, including my “fans”.
One song concerns a well-intentioned Peace rally turning into a riot of mob rule, and I hope will serve as a warning to some of the less brainy amateur politicians who just seem today to want to rebel against nothing in particular so jump on any convenient band-wagon and join the mob.
Another is a song written on behalf of Indians of any tribe who feel both bitterness and patriotism for America in that the history books and western movies have told only one side of the story and have censored out the parts that show Uncle Sam as a scoundrel or a bad guy; the Indians didn’t lose because they were inferior, stupid, or weaker, and this song sure does correct that mistake.
Americans seem willing enough to help – they just don’t know. And has JUST ONE American stepped forward to take on the burden of the whole fight to save what’s left of Indian culture, which at present rate will be gone beyond recovery in 20 years?
No Indian has been able; no white has been willing. It might be money down the drain, and health jeopardized for a dream, but at least I’m doing it! My career I could have with my talents alone, so it may be foolish to risk all I have for the sake of one third of all my publicity space to be filled with news to the public about something I don’t have to do, but somebody’s got to do it.
The tribe’s I stay with from state to state bless the ones who raised me. They’re in great need, and I only hope should it all end in shame and blame that it will fall on me, and not you.
Please encourage Dad to continue writing to me. He sure is a great encouragement and has shown me more understanding these past years than ever shared before.
My love to all. Please write again.
Love Buffy
[NDN "Savior Complex"?]
Super "Cree Indian" Buffy!
[Formerly an American "Indian" Girl / "Algonquin" Indian / "Micmac" Indian]
December 13, 1965
The Wakefield Daily Item Newspaper, Page 04
1966 -
A concert in Honolulu in 1966 led her to explore the Hawaiian Islands, and she’s lived there ever since.
February 20, 1966 (25 years old)
February 24, 1966
The Wakefield Daily Item Newspaper, Page 07
That Wakefieldians were prominent on the TV screen the night of February 22, 1966. Buffy St. Marie, one of the topmost folk singers of today, was a guess on the Merv Griffith show and unquestionably won the hearts of the live audience as well as the at-home viewers, with her quiet charm and warmth and her singing.
March 02, 1966
Buffy Sainte-Marie At Vanguard Records
(Photo by David Gahr/Getty Images)
NEW YORK - MARCH 2: Singer songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie poses for a portrait on March 2, 1966, during a recording session in the studios of Vanguard Records in New York City, New York.
March 12, 1966
The Ottawa Citizen Newspaper, Pages 16-17
March 29, 1966
The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix Newspaper, Page 08
April 17, 1966
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Newspaper, Page 2J
April 29, 1966
The Montreal Gazette Newspaper, Page 18
May 06, 1966
The Kensington News and West London Times Newspaper, Page 05
May 12, 1966
Arthur Santamaria of Wakefield, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, being unmarried, for consideration paid, grant to Joseph A. Cabral and Ethel Cabral, husband and wife, as tenant by the entirety, both of North Reading, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, with quitclaim covenants, the land in the Town of North Reading, being lots numbered 44, 44A, 44B, and 44C.
The description and encumbrances, if any, on Plan entitled “Parkside Little Farms” H. A. Millhouse, C. E. and R. F. Smith, C. E., filed with Middlesex, South District Deeds, Book 381, Page31.
Lots 44, 44A, 44B, and 44C front together 102.4’ feet on Maple Road and contain together about 46,498’ square feet, being the same dimensions, more or less, as laid down on said Plan, and to which Plan reference is made for more complete description.
For Arthur Santamaria’s title, see deed from Michael Santamaria and Amelia Santamaria, (Arthur’s parents) recorded in Middlesex South District Deeds Book 8024, Page 77.
[In North Reading, on Maple Street, it was like a "Little Italy" enclave/ neighborhood of Italian families]
May 14, 1966
The Record Newspaper, Page 10
Buffy: She’s Entitled
Much is hear of the success, in this or that artistic field, of what is described as native talent, but the rarest are those actually entitled to that designation. One for example, is the widely acclaimed folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, whose ancestry goes back as far as memory extends, and then some, for she is of pure Cree Indian descent.
The tribe from which she is descended flourished on the Canadian side of the border, but she was adopted and brought by another Indian family who were resident in this country and thus reared her with American citizenship, which she retains today.
May 20, 1966
The Montreal Star Newspaper, Page 16
May 21, 1966
La Presse (Montreal, Qc.) Newspapers, Page 30
After giving her recital (left) at the University of Saskatoon, Buffy Sainte-Marie (above) with Cree leader Pius Kaisowatum before returning to New York.
May 21, 1966
The Ottawa Citizen Newspaper, Pages 15-16
May 21, 1966
The Windsor Star – Weekend Magazine No. 21, Pages 16 -
By Bruce Moss
I am not a circus: Folk singer, composer, Buffy Sainte-Marie needs no gimmicks to be the success she is.
It was close to midnight, when Bruce Moss, the reporter had been directed to a small two-room house with a green roof 50 yards or so off the winding dirt road, lit interiorly by a flickering kerosene lamp. Buffy Sainte-Marie, 24 years of age [1965], invited him inside. She was making about $100,000.00 a year in the USA and abroad. Buffy was reluctant to say anything about her early upbringing. Even the name and location of the distant Indian reservation where she had been born had hitherto been kept secret.
She told Bruce Moss, that her Indian part of her life was not something she wished to share with the public, and that he was seeing a side of her no one knows about. Buffy stated that “this is where I was born [Piapot Reserve] and this where I come to remember how to live,” as she sat beside a dying fire in the wood stove. She wore snug-fitting corduroy slacks with a black turtle-neck sweater, not smiling (acting the stoic Indian), looking proud and every inch the full-blooded Cree her New York manager claimed she was. It was 4:00 a.m. (EST) and she had not slept in two nights. Buffy had come to Saskatchewan for visit her adoptive Cree family, to help them raise funding to save a sacred granite rock, called Mistaseni, from inundation by the newly-built South Saskatchewan Dam, located 100 miles west of the Piapot reservation, where she was born.
Buffy waived her usual $1,500.00 fee for a one-night event and consented to appear free at the University of Saskatchewan, which was a smashing success financially.
With her Cree sister, Brenda Star Blanket, 15 years of age, Buffy gathered cherry boughs on the Piapot Indian Reservation, later making them into mouth bows.
Although born on the Piapot Indian reservation on the flanks of the Qu’Appelle Valley a few miles north of Regina, Buffy grew up in New England. She was adopted at an early age by a Micmac couple who took her to live with them in Maine. Her father was a mechanic in a small town.
“During the summer we lived in a trailer in the woods,” she recalled. “My dad bought me a second-hand guitar – a horrible old thing -, which I learned to play in a few days. It was meant to keep me company while I cared for my young foster sister (Elaine “Lainey” Lucille St. Marie born September 1948). Buffy was a lonely child who kept to herself most of the time, and she began to compose her own songs.
Her foster parents were able to give Buffy opportunities that she could never have obtained on a reservation, including a university education.
Albert and Winifred encouraged her to keep her Indian ways, although life wasn’t too different from that of a white family.
“My real mother wasn’t in a position to keep me, but I always knew who she was and that I could go back to the place of my birth when I wished.”
Buffy got her chance to return home 6 years ago, when she was 18 years of age.
At an annual powwow in Ontario, a bunch of visiting Cree from Saskatchewan decided it was high time she was invited back. A formal adoption ceremony was arranged.
“They did things to me only an Indian girl would understand, the ceremony was as sacred to me as any marriage would be it was on that level.
Buffy Sainte-Marie has never enjoyed robust health, and she estimated that she spent about 2/3rds of each year in hospitals “because of a blood condition they have to feed me through my veins.” Due to the condition she said, “I collect medical bills by the thousands.”
She planned to have installed storm windows in several Cree homes at Piapot, and wanted to take Emile and Clara Piapot to Mexico, to get away from the cold in Saskatchewan.
Buffy is proud to be an Indian, even though she refused to sing in her native Cree language, or wear Indian dress while performing, or wear feathers in her hair, declaring that she is not a circus nor some kind of freak. she says.
Buffy was orphaned and later adopted out of Craven, Saskatchewan, Canada by a part Mi'kmaq woman from Maine-Massachusetts. At the age of 18, Buffy returned to Saskatchewan to reconnect with her roots, unfortunately her birth and adoption records were missing, the youngest son of Chief Piapot, Emile Piapot and his wife Clara, adopted her as their daughter through a formal ceremony.
June 20, 1966
Newport (Rhode Island) Daily News
Buffy Sainte-Marie attended the Newport Folk Festival.
June 24, 1966
A homestead farm in Harrison, Cumberland County, Maine was deeded by Mildred M. March and Richard Pell March of Medford, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, to Beverley J. St. Marie of New York City, New York, in consideration of $1.00 dollar and other valuable consideration paid by Beverley J. St. Marie, assigns to her and her heirs a certain lot or parcel of land the homestead farm of Ella M. Purington, neighboring Eugene Hanson homestead farm (on the north), Summit Hill Farm, nor or formerly owned by Don Seitz (on the east), Summit Hill Road (on the south), and by the homestead farm of Matti Pulkinen (to the west). Said farm was 65 acres, that had been conveyed to Joseph Purington by the Directors of the Harrison Waterpower Company by deed dated December 07, 1895.
Being precisely the same premises conveyed to by deed of Mildred M. March by deed of Federal Land Bank of Springfield, dated April 09, 1938, and recorded in the Cumberland County Registry of Deeds, Book 1640, Page 280. Mildred M. March has subsequently conveyed this property by deed to Richard Pell March, Trustee under a Trust indenture dated May 17, 1965.
July 16, 1966
The Trend Magazine, Pages 20-21
The Injun is Going Up Away
Born on a reservation, and with all the glamour to make the album world her own.
Her name is Buffy Sainte-Marie. This must mean a lot to you if you know her LP’s (best sellers in America and Canada) or were at the Albert Hall a few weeks ago to see her tremendous concert or caught her on television. She’s unique or even more so, Buffy has come to Britain for three months of concert and TV appearances. She styles herself a singer/ composer – remember Donovan’s hit, “Universal Soldier”?
Buffy is a North American Indian (a member of the Cree tribe) and was brought up on a reservation until she left home to go to college. “Saskatchewan is still home although I don’t get there much, but all the things I collect during my travels I send home to store.”
Buffy (real name Beverley) is 23 with long, blue-black hair, a smile that lights nights, and a happy, unaffected nature. She has a deep involvement in her music yet is still a feminine young woman. She feels strongly about ‘her people’ and has written songs telling of the plight of the American Indian today.
“Those songs are too strong for TV,” said Buffy. “When I appeared on your pop programs here, they asked me to sing something light and happy. I’ve written some nice, happy songs. I wrote a friendship song for a friend of mine, Dave Crosby of the Byrd’s, but he hasn’t heard it yet.”
The love of music was born in Buffy. “When I was four my mother bought a piano, so I learned to play it in a day, so I was taken along to a teacher. He said I shouldn’t be forced to learn, to let my natural love for music develop. Later one, I was given an old guitar which I taught myself to play. I worked out 32 different tunings for it. I didn’t know you just tuned it one way.”
Buffy now has an incredible collection of instruments, from primitive mouth bow to string instruments especially sent from India.
“I took my guitar to college to keep me company, but soon the girls were asking me to sing, my shyness melted and that was how I started singing.”
The day Buffy graduated from college (in Oriental philosophy), she went to Greenwich Village and asked if she could sing in a club. When she returned home that night, she had a recording contract, an agent and manager. As fate would have it, they were in the audience. “However, I didn’t sign a paper for two years as they wanted me to sign my soul away,” said Buffy. Just before Buffy left America, articles appeared in Time and Life Magazines about her, and she appeared on a nationwide TV show.
Buffy is a girl who loves animals (her manager has a tiger cub), believes in astrology, yet behind her happy smile few people know of her constant battle with a chronic illness which keeps her in and out of hospital.
Buffy is a delightful mixture of artistic dedication and frivolous femininity. She has composed a concerto for guitar and orchestra, loves to sketch and paint, and cook, and design her own clothes. “I like simple clothes, I get terribly attached to clothes and wear them till they fall apart, then have them copied. I love lingerie and granny nighties and perfume, and all ‘girlish’ things.”
Buffy is a girl constantly on the move, and her advice to any would-be girl singer – “Learn to iron and be able to carry your own gear and guitar.” Buffy travels alone except when her Spanish-gypsy, artist-boyfriend, Indius, is free to travel with her. “He’s wonderful, tall and handsome, and a brilliant painter.”
Buffy smiled softly and in that moment was just a girl in love with ‘her’ boy, her music and her life.
Buffy is a North American Indian (a member of the Cree tribe) ...
... brought up on a reservation (?)
... until she left home to go to college (?)
😂😂😂😂
July 25, 1966
The Record Newspaper, Page 02
July 27, 1966
The Wakefield, MA Daily Item Newspaper, Page 06
Personable Folk Singer
Buffy Has Loyal Local Audience
BEVERLY ST. MARIE, 1958, as a Wakefield High School graduate, Class of 1958. (Oracle photo).
BUFFY ST. MARIE, renowned folk singer, shown on a recent visit to Saskatchewan and respite from a busy career of personal appearances, television assignments, and record-cutting.
Buffy St. Marie, the personable folk singer who is said to make around $100,000.00 a year and whose first two record albums have already sold more than 60,000.00 each, had a ready-made and loyal audience in Wakefield. Her performances in concerts and on stage routinely are greeted with standing ovations, it is reported, but her rare appearances on TV would have an astounding Wakefield audience if a local survey were ever made.
There are many in town who remember Buffy as a Wakefield High School student. She was graduated with the Class of 1958, and the yearbook thumbnail sketch read:
Buffy’s plans changed, as all folk singing fans know. First there was her college education at the University of Massachusetts, from which she was graduated in 1962 with a major in oriental philosophy and elementary education. She also earned the distinction there of being coted one of the ten most outstanding students of the class.
Buffy, who was self-taught on the guitar, had long fooled around with folk music, composing her own numbers, but it wasn’t until she entertained impromptu at a Greenwich Village coffee house and was immediately spotted as “unique,” that the music career developed.
Coincidentally, as this story was being written, a note from Mrs. Raymond C. Atkinson of Washington, D.C., enclosing a clipping about Buffy, came to the desk.
“Having read about Buffy Sainte-Marie in the Dailey Item newspaper,” Mrs. Atkinson’s note reads, “I though the enclosed clipping from her Washington Star might be interest to you … I was pleased to see that this gifted young woman is winning recognition not only for her contribution in the field of social problems.”
The Washington Post article reports that Buffy was selected by Sargent Shriver to be one of the 30 young people on the advisory board for the Office of Economic Opportunity’s “Upward Bound” program to give impoverished youth a summer pre-college tutoring chance to realize their potential.
It adds that “Through her composing and performing, she believes she remains the teacher she started out to be because there’s a real lack of communication between Indian and non-Indian.”
Proceeds from Buffy’s concerts are earmarked for educational benefits from time to time, among them, recently, two high school scholarships for two Indian youths.
A story in “Weekend Magazine,” Sunday magazine section of the Telegraph Journal, Evening Times-Globe of St. John, New Brunswick, this spring, tells of her being Saskatchewan to visit her parents, Emile and Clara Piapot. It also relates that she was adopted at an early age by a Micmac couple who took her to live with them. Wakefieldians remember her as a member of the Albert C. Santamaria/ St. Marie family of 24a Prospect Street. [Note: Mrs. Winifred Irene (Kenrick) Santamaria/ St. Marie, formerly was active in the First Parish Congregational Church and for several years worked as a proofreader for the Wakefield Daily Item newspaper.]
Wakefield, less prominent in the recent publicity about the high-ranking folk-singer, was close to Buffy’s heart not too long ago, and we suspect, she still treasures fond memories of her young girlhood here. In 1964, already recognized as a “top talent,” Buffy returned to Wakefield to give a benefit performance on behalf of the Fourth of July celebration sponsored by the West Side Social Club, and the previous year, she had been one of the biggest hits of the “Hootenanny” feature of the July 4th celebration itself.
September 26, 1966
The Calgary Herald Newspaper, Page 17
October 01, 1966
The Albertan Newspaper
By Linda Curtis – Albertan’s Women’s Editor
Buffy cherishes Indian heritage
Buffy Sainte-Marie, one of the hottest names in show business today, is a tiny girl with lustrous waist-length black hair and an appealing piquant face. She smiles easily but a certain look of sadness still remains in her dark eyes.
She arrived in Calgary, Alberta by plane Friday afternoon, escorted by a tall young artist, Indius Alvares, her constant companion. Their first stop was the Indian Friendship Center…
I have had opportunities that most Indians don’t have.
Adopted by a Micmac couple from Maine, she took a degree in education and majored in Oriental philosophy at the University of Massachusetts.
But she is a Cree, and her home reserve is at Piapot, north of Regina, where her family still lives. She returns regularly for a visit and speaks warmly of her parents.
She clings to her Indian heritage, and she loves to do bead and quill work, she goes shooting with bow and arrow, and she loves the simple philosophy of her people.
She doesn’t use her Indian background as a handy stepping stone to success. “I never wear my Indian costumes on stage,” she says firmly, “and the costume wouldn’t add anything to my music.” In one simple sentence, this young girl summed up the spirit of our time.
October 04, 1966
The Edmonton Journal Newspaper, Page 26
October 05, 1966
The Vancouver Sun Newspaper, Page 23
October 07, 1966
The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix Newspaper, Page 30
October 26, 1966
The Broadside Volume V, No. 18 Cambridge, Massachusetts
December 30, 1966
Portrait of Canadian musician Buffy Sainte-Marie as she plays guitar, New York, New York.
January 24, 1967
The Montreal Star Newspaper, Page 12
By Doris Giller
Folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie: Wants to Put Indian Myth Straight
A tiny girl with a strong face, an equally strong, but warm, handshake and cascading black waist-length hair, Miss Sainte-Marie only chose sides in the White man-Indian struggle during her high school days.
Canadian-born:
She was born in Craven, Saskatchewan, near Regina. “I don’t know who my real mother was, it’s a mystery. Perhaps I was illegitimate, perhaps it was something else. “Mais, je ne veux pas prendre ça” she swung easily from English into French at a press conference held at the Royal Embassy Hotel, meaning in English, “But, I don't want to take that.”
While still a baby she was adopted by a part-white, part Indian family and brought up in Massachusetts.
“I was brought up like most girls,” she said. “I had short hair and was concerned with makeup; but it wasn’t until high school (where she learned fluent French) that I began to learn which way I preferred and was able to choose which way I would take.
“My parents were hardworking (her father, a mechanic; her mother, a proofreader) and they didn’t look Indian. But they always let me know I was Indian, and they tried to prepare me.”
Asked whether she had suffered as a child because she was Indian, she replied: “Oh yes, but everyone suffers.”
January 27, 1967
The Gazette Newspaper, Page 10
January 28, 1967
La Presse (Montreal, Qc.) Newspaper, Page 05
Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Indian problem in songs
Buffy Sainte-Marie informed us that “Buffy” is a diminutive of “Beverley”, her real name. “Sainte-Marie” is the name of the family that adopted her. Although born in Canada, she is now an American citizen.
Buffy has her own ideas on the history of Canada which makes her laugh:
For 25% percent cruelty among the Indians, put 75% percent on the part of the whites! ... History textbooks are full of falsehoods. There are only two serious authors who rely on authentic documents and cite them in their works: John Cellier and Jack Forbes. I advise you to read them.
Quite touching, the story of Buffy Sainte-Marie, a natural girl. She never knew her parents, but in Craven, Saskatchewan was where she was brought up, there are old Indians who knew her parents and talk to her about them.
An Indian nomad through and through, Buffy Sainte-Marie tells us that she is a nomad, that she has no fixed address.
“I travel 52 weeks a year. I have things in Maine, I have them in New York, I have them in Craven, everywhere, even in Europe. I am quite well known in Finland and England. Why Finland? No one goes to Finland. We go to Denmark, Sweden, but we ignore Finland Mol, one day, I decided to go for a walk there. I sang and it seems that my songs are liked. It must also be said that the exotic side had something to do with it.
February 20, 1967 (26 years old)
February 26, 1967
The New York Daily News Newspaper, Page 04
March 17, 1967
March 21, 1967
The Wakefield (MA) Daily Items Newspaper, Pages 01-08
Buffy St. Marie, Wakefield High School graduate with the Class of 1958, Sunday received the crowning glory of her young life when the New York Times newspaper said of her formal debut at Philharmonic Hall in New York:
“It was, in short, a triumphal evening for her. She has consolidated her diverse talents and must now be counted among the very best of today’s modern minstrels.” Her debut was reported by the Times’ music critic, Robert Sherman.
Buffy is remembered by Wakefieldians as a member of the Albert St. Mare family of 24a Prospect Street. Mrs. Winifred St. Marie formerly was active in the First Parish Congregational Church, and at one time was employed as a proofreader with the Wakefield Daily Item newspaper.
After graduating from WHS, Buffy went to the University of Massachusetts, earning her degree there in 1962. Her annual earnings are estimated at more than $100,000.00.
Writes Robert Sherman in Sunday’s New York Times:
In the four years since Buffy Sainte Marie first sang at a McDougal Street cabaret, the 25-year-old Cree Indian girl from Sebago Lake, Maine, has made several recordings, written songs that gave pop hits to Paul Anka and Booby Darin, and built up a large, devoted, almost cultish following here.
Friday night, making her formal concert at Philharmonic Hall, Miss Sainte-Marie demonstrated that she has also grown from a promising talent into an artist of varied and vastly impressive achievements.
Her dark, powerful voice is amazing adaptable. It can be sweet one moment, violently shrill the next. It can convey tenderness and anguish and bitter fury. Stylistically she was equally convincing with traditional ballads, Southern play-party tunes blues and long-lined semi-pop material a al Jacques Brei.
As a composer (a good deal more than half the songs were her own), she sometimes gets trapped in obscure, rather pretentious symbolism. But she can also produce music that has a potent ring of truth. “Codeine,” the harrowing lament of a narcotics addict, is one of these superb creations. Another is a protest song against a breaking of a treaty with the Indians that Miss Sainte-Marie performed with flaming, almost painful intensity. In “Los Pescadores,” she captured the vigorous spirit of a Mexican peasant chant, and in her now-famous “Universal Soldier” she hurled a provocative challenge to the men who wage war.
It was, in short, a triumphal evening for her. She has consolidated her diverse talents and must now be counted among the very best of today’s modern minstrels.”
March 26, 1967
The San Francisco Examiner Newspaper, Page 29
April 03, 1967
The San Francisco Chronicle Newspaper
April 09, 1967
April 17, 1967
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Newspaper
June 30, 1967 - July 06, 1967
Berkley Barb Periodical Newspaper, Page 05
By John Bryan
Buffy Sainte-Marie
I came away from the second meeting with the feeling that I’d met a very different person than the girl who sang at the Troubadour. (Are there two Buffy Sainte-Marie’s?).
I also felt that Buffy, an enigmatic oracle who somehow combines the teasing innocence of a child with the ages-weary wisdom of an old woman, did not reveal herself at all.
We talked a lot about the new hippy fad of studying and identifying with Indians and Indian customs. Buffy was a bit amused.
Buffy Sainte-Marie: It doesn’t make any sense to me,” said she, “these kids trying to be Indians. They’ll never be Indians. The white people never seem to realize they cannot suck the soul out of a race. The ones with the sweetest intentions are the worst soul-suckers.
These hippies who are trying to be Indians or trying to be Negro … they’re trying to be anything but white … and they’re acting so very whitely about the whole thing.
It’s the weirdest vampire idea. It’s very perverted. It has something to do with the idea that people are always trying to identify with a race they’ve conquered … It always happens about the fifth generation … I mean, they won’t even let the Indian have his ghost.
Don’t they realize that the only way they can improve things is to try to be the best kind of white people they can be? I don’t care how many books they read or how many mushrooms they eat … they’ll never become Indians.”
“Ya. Be a good hippy. If you’re going to be a hippy, don’t try to be an Indian too.
John Bryan: Perhaps one reason for the great interest now in Indians is the eating of Peyote and other hallucinogens.
Buffy Sainte-Marie: But still, the white people have to go back to the fact they’re white people. A lot of them think they’re somehow escaping by learning how an Indian lives or a Negro lives and having only Indian or Negro friends. But still, they have a white birth certificate. He has to face it. Just like the Negro has to face the fact he’s Negro and the Indian that he’s an Indian. And there are some things the white man will never be able to have and maybe this is why he’s eternally hungry. He lacks that which the Indians have.”
It's just that the white people have to realize and face their own history, who they are, what they’ve done, what each of us has done and what each of us has yet to do.
I mean, I know what it feels like to swallow a philosophy and all of a sudden start thinking in a foreign way. That still never changes the facts of your reality.
(Buffy, adopted by white parents, lived very much in the “white” world as a child. She attended the University of Massachusetts, Smith, Amherst, and Mount Holyoke Colleges before becoming a full-time performer. She majored in oriental philosophy.)
John Bryan: It seems strange to me that you are so deeply involved and identify so much with Indian problems. You’re a very cosmopolitan person. You’ve absorbed so many cultures.
Buffy Sainte-Marie: Only two. I’m precisely half-Indian and precisely half-white.
John Bryan: Has this created a certain ‘schizophrenia’ in you?
Buffy Sainte-Marie: Yes. There are times when I hate my half white. There are also times when I feel ill-at-ease on an Indian reservation. I was on a Cree reservation in Saskatchewan a few months ago and I’m going back there in a few weeks. I’m teaching the Cree kids and trying to establish some kind of communication between the white teachers and the Indian community. And I’m trying to get the kids back with their grandparents, trying to get that re-established. I’m just teaching true histories, straightening out the facts, that’s all.
I refuse to give up anything ever. I like it very much this living death I live, this living death I have [Yogi India ideology].
I am a white performer working for hippies. I told you I could do more good at home teaching 50 kids because teaching the hippies doesn’t seem to do much good. All their doing is getting entertained. I might as well be singing words with no contact at all because it turns out to be entertainment after all. But I am satisfied. I have no complaints with what I’m doing in life. I’m doing everything I want, absolutely everything. I’m living like a child who’s coloring pictures when he wants to and then he goes out and rides a pony or reads his book and then he plays with his trucks, and he’s totally approved of by his mother and can’t do anything wrong. That’s the way I feel in the world. I feel I can’t do anything wrong. And I just write my songs whenever they seem to come to me, and people seem to like them. You know … how much of a soft piece of cake can you have? Life is just a chocolate layer cake for me.
July 05, 1967
July 06, 1967
The Honolulu Star-Bulletin Newspaper, Page B-10
Buffy, "hiding" from the public, had initially told Dewaine/ Dewayne Bugbee that her name was Marie Starblanket" and ONLY when they were engaged did she reveal to his parents that she was indeed Buffy Sainte-Marie. Did she reveal to Dewaine or to his parents that she was, in fact, Beverley Jean Santamaria as well?
July 07, 1967
The Honolulu Star-Bulletin Newspaper, Page B-4
July 07, 1967
The Lewiston Daily Sun Newspaper, Page 21
July 07, 1967
The Portland Herald Press Newspaper, Page 21
July 08, 1967
The Honolulu Star Bulletin Newspaper
July 08, 1967
The Honolulu Advertiser Newspaper
July 11, 1967
Le Presse (Montreal) Newspaper, Page 17
Folklore star marries
HONOLULU (PA) - Folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie has announced her soon-to-be marriage to Dewayne Bugbee. a sportsman who likes the decor of the beach, and who rides horses. "Plus, he has a passion for children, and he's exactly the type of man I was looking for," the singer said on the beach in Kuali, Honolulu.
Originally from Harrison, Maine, Buffy Sainte-Marie spent her childhood on the Cree Indian reservation, and she lived on an Indian reservation north of Regina. Her songs of protest concerning the living conditions of the Indians had won her success, and she is now ranked as a star among folk performers.
July 17, 1967
The Newport (Rhode Island) Daily Press Newspaper, Page 01
July 17, 1967
The Newport Daily Newspaper, Page 01
Folk Festival 1967 drew to a close last night with 11,000 people cheering to hear more of Buffy Sainte-Marie and other folk singers.
Blair Stonechild’s ©2012, Page 48-49: It was during a 1962 visit to Wikwémikong powwow on Manitoulin Island that “Buffy” first came into contact with her possible relatives.
Buffy took a train to Wikwémikong [in the summer of 1963] to meet and spend time with Rosemary Fisher, Wilfred Pelletier, and others of their extended family.
At the powwow, Buffy was introduced to Emile Piapot, a Cree traveling with several other singers and dancers from Saskatchewan’s Piapot Reserve.
Emile Piapot spoke both Cree and Indian and Buffy explained that she had been told that she had been born to an Indian family in Saskatchewan.
There was an easy rapport between Emile and Buffy, and Emile quietly listened to Buffy, then “he shared with her how he had once given up an infant daughter” (“Buffy” is making this disclosure up out of thin air!). Buffy was thrilled when Emile invited her to visit his family in Saskatchewan [which she did in October 1963 when that reporter showed up suddenly, knocking on Emile Piapot's door, because she had made it a PR opportunity].
July 17, 1967
The Boston Globe Newspaper
July 22, 1967
The Ottawa Citizen Newspaper, Page 14
Mariposa Festival Program
Buffy Sainte-Marie was among the performers at the year’s Mariposa Folk Festival, which was held at Innis Lake, Toronto, on August 11 to 13, 1967.
Miss Sainte-Marie will take part in a songwriters’ workshop directed by Leonard Cohen. Workshops will present films; songs, dances, and instrumental styles of the British Isles; blues lyrics; a hootenanny for perform. Canadian folklore.
August 01, 1967
The Times Record Newspaper, Page 06
September 08, 1967
The Wakefield Daily Item Newspaper, Page 02
The Item Hears
That Television watchers of the “Today” Show Tuesday morning viewed with interest interviews with Buffy St. Marie, formerly of Wakefield, president of Nova College which opens this month at Ft. Lauderdale, Florida with 20 students on the doctoral level. Dr. Winstead is a former principal of Lynnfield High School.
September 30, 1967
The Messenger Messenger, Page 04
November 12, 1967
The Journal Times Newspaper, Page 13C
October 08, 1967
The Pantagraph Newspaper, Page D-1
November 20, 1967
Alvin Dwaine Kamaikalani Bugbee married to Buffy (“Marie”) Sainte-Marie in Kauai, Hawaii.
February 20, 1968 (27 years old)
Buffy Sainte-Marie and Chet Atkins – Nashville Airport, 1968
Buffy Sainte-Marie performing in the Netherlands in the Grand Gala du Disque Populaire.
April 12, 1968
Family Weekly: The Newspaper Magazine
What In the World Section
Folk Tale: “The only plan I have is: Don’t make any plans,” says folk singer Buffy St. Marie. She didn’t plan to go to college, become a singer, or get married. Yet she has done all three. The marriage was a result of an incognito vacation to Hawaii. “I met this boy on the beach.
I lied to him and told him my name was "Marie Starblanket"... We were engaged before I told him who I really was. Now my name is Mrs. DeWaine Kamaikalani Bugbee, but he and his family still call me Marie.”
April 29, 1968
Mortgage regarding Real Estate
Albert C. Santamaria & Winifred I. Santamaria, husband and wife, holder of the mortgage, from Richard K. & Sharon J. Tuck to Albert C. Santamaria & Winifred I. Santamaria, recorded with Middlesex South District County Registry of Deeds Book 1498, Page 174
[SEE August 25, 1987]
October 11, 1968
The (British Columbia) Vancouver Sun Newspaper, Page 31
By Gordon Wetmore
Buffy Sainte-Marie: Important Link with Two Cultures
Her name is Buffy Sainte-Marie, and she sings. She sees herself not just as a singer but as a link between Indians and non-Indians.
A Lot to Learn
“Having grown up in the non-Indian culture, I know there’s nothing to fear on either side. But there’s a lot to learn for both Indians and non-Indians.”
Although born in Saskatchewan, she was raised by foster parents in Maine, and said, “I was never encouraged to seek out my Indian background. I was more interested in being like all my girlfriends and doing what my girlfriends did. But when I cut and bleached my hair like they did, it didn’t look very good. I guess I came to be me by process of elimination.”
She said she spent a summer in a trailer in the Maine woods with her adopted family and just for something to do proceeded to teach herself how to play the guitar.
Buffy Sainte-Marie at 80
It is believed that Buffy Sainte-Marie was born in 1941 on the Piapot First Nation 75 Reserve in Saskatchewan and taken from her biological parents when she was two or three. She was adopted by a visibly white couple in Massachusetts, though her adoptive mother, Winifred, self-identified as part Mi’kmaq. Sainte-Marie’s experience of being adopted out of her culture and placed in a non-Indigenous family by child welfare services is an all-too-familiar story in Canada. This practice was later dubbed the 'Sixties Scoop', referring to the decade in which it was most prevalent (though it had gone on well before the 1960s, and would go on for decades to come).
Sainte-Marie’s childhood wasn’t easy—she secretly suffered abuse inside and outside the home—but she says she was also able to cultivate a lot of happiness for herself. She was always close to Winifred, and credits her for nurturing and encouraging a lifelong love of learning. She also took comfort in solitude and, even as a little kid, always felt a strong connection to her inner creativity. Sainte-Marie surrounded herself with nature and animals and her own sense of wonder. She began playing piano when she was three, but school band and choir weren’t of any interest to her. The structured learning of traditional music classes was antithetical to Sainte-Marie’s natural gifts. She taught herself guitar, but it wasn’t until she got to college that she began playing her songs publicly.
As Sainte-Marie developed as a songwriter and performed in Canada and the U.S., she also continued to research and reconnect with her Indigenous roots, meeting other young Indigenous scholars and activists on both sides of the border. She’d been told she was adopted from an Indigenous family in Saskatoon but didn’t know much else. After spending time at Toronto’s Friendship Centre (now the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto), two of her new friends suggested that Sainte-Marie was possibly the daughter of Emile Piapot, of the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley.
[Allegedly, the connection was made after discovering that Piapot’s own story aligned with what Sainte-Marie had pieced together about her origins.]
Buffy Sainte-Marie met Emile Piapot at a powwow in Ontario, and a short while later visited the Piapot reserve for the first time. In the early 1960s, she was officially adopted back into the Piapot family and given the Cree name “Medicine Bird Singing.”
Buffy Sainte-Marie is a Cree singer-songwriter, guitarist, mouth-bow player, artist, and educator who was born February 20, 1941, at the Piapot Reserve in Saskatchewan, Canada. Orphaned when a few months old, she was raised by a part Micmac family in Massachusetts; and later adopted by a Cree family related to her biological parents.
Beverly “Buffy” Jean Sainte-Marie was born in 1941 on the Piapot 75 reserve in the Qu'Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, Canada, to Cree parents. At age two or three she was taken from her parents as part of the Sixties Scoop - a government policy where Indigenous children were taken from their families, communities and cultures for placement in non-Native foster homes, from which they would be adopted by white families. She was adopted by Americans, Alfred and Winifred Sainte-Marie, a "visibly white" Wakefield, Massachusetts couple, though her adoptive mother, Winifred, "self-identified as part Mi'kmaq.”
Some accounts claim that Buffy Sainte-Marie was adopted by family relatives after the death of her parents, so it's unclear what exactly happened. Sainte-Marie herself says that "it had been going on for generations, where native children were removed from the home for their own good [...] they're assigned a birthday. They're assigned kind of a biography. So, in many cases, adoptive people don't really know what the true story is." According to CBC, this resettlement is known as The Sixties Scoop, since the practice accelerated in the 1960s, but it existed well before.
By John-Carlos Perea
Buffy Sainte-Marie
Born: February 20, 1941, or February 20, 1942
Notable Works: “Cod’ine” “Coincidence (and Likely Stories)” “Illuminations” “It’s My Way!” “Medicine Songs” “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone” “Power in the Blood” “Universal Soldier” “Up Where We Belong”
Buffy Sainte-Marie, by name of Beverly Sainte-Marie, (born February 20, 1941 - ‘42, Piapot Reserve, Saskatchewan, Canada), Canadian-born American singer-songwriter, guitarist, political activist, and visual artist known especially for her use of music to promote awareness of issues affecting Native Americans.
Sainte-Marie’s breakthrough came in 1963, when critic Robert Shelton of The New York Times praised her as “one of the most promising new talents on the folk scene.” The review led to a contract with Vanguard Records and to the release of her first album, It’s My Way! (1964). The recording contained a number of songs that became stylistic benchmarks in the development of her musical corpus. “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone” addressed Native American land rights and intercultural relationships. The song featured Sainte-Marie’s distinctive tremolo vocal technique, which is often attributed to the influence of Native American powwow singing but which may also reflect Sainte-Marie’s acknowledged identification with the French singer Edith Piaf, whose vocal style was marked by a similar warbling quality.
Buffy Sainte-Marie was born in 1941 on the Piapot Plains Cree First Nation Reserve in the Qu'Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, Canada. She was later adopted, growing up in Massachusetts, with parents Alfred and Winifred Sainte-Marie. She attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst, earning degrees in teaching and Oriental philosophy and graduating in the top ten of her class. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in Fine Art from the University of Massachusetts.
In 1964, on a “return” trip to the Piapot Cree reserve in Canada for a powwow she was welcomed and (in a Cree Nation context) adopted by the youngest son of Chief Piapot, Emile Piapot and his wife Clara Piapot, who added to Sainte-Marie's cultural value of, and place in, native culture.
December 16, 1968
The Baltimore Sun Morning Newspaper, Page B7
The Atlantic Constitution Newspaper, Page 2-L
January 01, 1969
United Kingdom Photograph of Buffy Sainte-Marie
Current Biography, Pages 387-389
By Clifford Thom
Buffy Sainte-Marie
Feb. 20, 1942, (?)
Home: Summit Hill, in Harrison, Maine 04040
In 1966, Peter LaFarge, was quoted by Donald Myrus in Ballads, Blues, and the Big Beat, as saying of Buffy Sainte-Marie, “It’s very difficult to grow up ashamed and shy among your schoolmates because you’re strange and different and alien, then to find pride and strength from the very disaster of your people and carry it with you as first concern, I have an overcrowded heart.”
Beverly Sainte-Marie – who acquired the nickname “Buffy” as a child – was born to Cree Indian parents on the Piapot Reserve at Craven, Saskatchewan, Canada. The date of her birth, according to a reliable source, was February 20, 1942. Other sources give the year as 1941 or 1943. Orphaned when she was a few months old, she was adopted by Albert C. Sainte-Marie, a mechanic, and Winifred (Kendrick) Sainte-Marie.
Her adoptive parents, who had lost a child [Wayne Roger Santamaria died in 1940] of their own, are both part-Micmac Indian. They brought her up in Wakefield, Massachusetts, where they made their home, and it was through them that she obtained United States citizenship. The family spent summers at Sebago Lake, Maine.
References:
Life Magazine 59:53+ D 10 ’65 pors
Look Magazine 28:59+ D 15 ’64 pors
New York Sunday News Magazine Page 6 F 26 ’67 pors
Time Magazine 86:62 D 10 ’65 por
B. Klein and D. Icolari, eds. Reference Encyclopedia of the American Indian (1967)
Who’s Who in America, 1968-1969
January 12, 1969
The Democrat and Chronicle Newspaper
(D&C – Chicago Sun Times)
By Linda Rockey
Buffy Is More Than a Singer
NEW YORK – If any one voice could be called a synthesis of American music, it would have to be the warm, intense vibrato of Buffy Sainte-Marie.
She is, first of all, descendant of the original American – a Cree Indian with cooper skin, thick, black hair, long thin nose and prominent cheekbones. She was first heard from in 1964 advocating the Indian cause with passionate conviction.
However, her repertoire ranges from ancient legends to country and Western, from Mexican guitar to comic brogue, from wistful Negro spirituals to modern folk-rock.
All in her own inimitable style, of course, Buffy is more than a singer – a poet and a composer who has been making up songs in her head since at the age of four, when she first plunked the keys of her adoptive parents’ second-hand piano.
Her appeal, as well as her material, has broadened. Two years ago, she played the guitar and primitive mouth bow for select high-brow groups. Now she entertains concert hall audiences, making them weep over their fathers’ injustices to the Indian or laugh as she purses her lips to mimic a kasazoo. The majority in her audiences are teen – or college – age, but a few parents are usually there too.
“There are always a few from the establishment who come to my dressing room to tell me they came to get mad and liked me instead,” says the softly pretty 25-year-old.
“I guess people are surprised when somebody is serious about giving them something, there’s so much grabbing the pockets these days, but I really am. I don’t have a word for it – you might call it sharing a healthy good will.”
Country and Western music is the most for her, and even those who don’t usually like it reconsider when they hear her sing “I Wanna Be a Country Girl Again.” She especially likes “down-to-earth rock and blues.” Although she is known in the cities as a protest musician, she doesn’t sing many songs of dissent because “they make me too sad.”
Nearly all her songs are her own, and she has volumes of unpublished poetry. Completely self-taught, from the piano at 4 years of ag to the guitar at 17, she can play almost any instrument by ear. “But someday I would like to learn the guitar the way everybody else does.”
Although she could do more, Buffy limits concerts to two a week on a three-month tours. She has an agent in New York, but travels only with her tall, blond 20-year-old husband, Dewain Bugbee, whom she met a year ago on a beach in Hawaii, where he was teaching surfing.
After each tour, they return to their mountain home in Hawaii where “he plows, and I plant our own food. That’s when I write my music and poems, paint and draw, surf a little, embroider, and hike in the mountains. We’re much happier with clean air and water. It takes a couple of months in the woods to become fruitful again.”
When they start a family, they plan to retire there and raise horses. But Buffy is also very much involved in the Indian fight for dignity, even though she never knew her Cree parents. Her parents raised her in New England.
“I was pretty ordinary teenager, cutting and bleaching my hair because I wanted to look like Seventeen magazine. My girlfriends would tear each other apart in high school. I turned off to this in my Junior year and began to read everything.”
My parents told me that what the movies and history books said about Indians wasn’t necessarily so. This was the greatest gift they could have given me.”
Although she has done some TV shows and plays and likes to act, she turned down four movie offers because “my contract says that if I play an Indian, all the other roles have to be filled by my people.”
This winter she and her husband plan to live with several other musicians near Los Angeles and give a benefit for their free medical clinic in the city. (Buffy and Tommy Smothers take turns paying its rent.)
“We get very lonesome for other musicians. Most of our lives are like this – coffee cups and hotel rooms – very plastic.”
January 13, 1969
The Wakefield Daily Item Newspaper
Legal Notice – Middlesex, Massachusetts Probate Court
To Winifred I. Santamaria, of Kapaa Kauai in the State of Hawaii.
A libel has been presented to said Court by your husband, Albert C. Santamaria praying that a divorce from the bond of marriage between himself and you be decreed for the cause of desertion.
If you desire to object thereto, you or your attorney should file a written appearance in said Court at Cambridge within 21 days from the 18th of February, 1969, the return day of this citation.
Witness, Joseph W. Monahan, Esquire, First Judge of said Court, this 23rd day of December 1968.
John V. Harvey, Register.
January 16, 1969
The Charlotte News Newspaper, Page 17A
February 20, 1969 (28 Years)
March 07, 1969
Bill Graham presents in New York, Buffy Sainte-Marie
Buffy Sainte-Marie found music at an early age. Orphaned as a baby, she was adopted by parents of Micmac Indian descent (she is a Cree Indian herself) and was raised in Maine and Massachusetts. She taught herself to play piano as a young child and at seventeen began to play guitar, quickly developing a unique style. She utilizes different tunings on guitar and has also mastered the mouth bow, an ancient and rarely performed instrument.
A graduate in Oriental Philosophy of the University of Massachusetts, Miss Sainte-Marie came to New York after college and started singing in the small folk clubs of Greenwich Village. Each of her performances outshone the former and she quickly became an established member of the contemporary music family. She now resides in Maine on a farm with her husband and continues to perform and record. She has released five albums on Vanguard, with a new live record due very shortly.
March 11, 1969
May 17, 1969
The Courier-News (Bridgewater, NJ) Newspaper, Page 15
Buffy St. Marie has formed a production company to develop company to develop two of her own stories for the screen. They are “Guess Who I Saw in Paris,” which deals with a pair of contemporary musicians, and “Campus,” about an Indian girl (herself) who meets a southern boy (citing her 1963 relationship with Patrick Lynch a.k.a. Pat Sky) in a coffee house. Buffy will play the musician and the Indian girl, Natch. She’d like Mike Jagger for the other musician and Glen Campbell as the college boy from the South. Not bad.
And Buffy, men tell me, has two of the nicest legs in the business, besides that great voice.
May 20, 1969
Town of Wakefield, Middlesex County, Massachusetts
Board of Public Works
Order establishing new sidewalk
The Board of Public Works of the Town of Wakefield, acting in pursuance of the provisions of Chapter 83 of the General Laws and Amendments thereof and of every other power and authority hereto enabling, at a meeting duly held on the 20th of May 1969, does hereby adjudge that the public convenience requires that at new sidewalk be established on the south side of Water Street, in the said town, between Farm Street and Wiley Street, be constructed, in said location with granite edge stones, and with surface material of bituminous concrete and at the grade established by the Town Engineer.
The total cost of said construction, reconstruction and the assessments to be made therefor are estimated as set forth below, and the estates to be assessed are numbered in the numbering of said Street, or otherwise described as follows:
Total estimated cost: $8,000.00
(Owners as of January 01, 1969, … Plat 40)
Arthur SantaMaria 105.00’ Frontage at 483 Water St. Lot 34 Estimate: $704.37
Anthony S. & Marie Pietrello 80.00’ Frontage at 479 Water St. Lot 33B Estimate: $536.66
Frank & Celia Procopio 100’ Frontage at 475 Water St. Lot 33A Estimate: $536.66
Ernest A & Doris C. Masiello 100’ Frontage at 465 Water St. Lot 19 Estimate: $670.82
All 4 were Italians!
January 04, 1970
The Express and News (San Antonio, Texas) Newspaper, Page 17
By Kathy Orloff (Chicago Sun Times News Service)
The Indian occupation of Alcatraz has caused several music people to lend a hand and do benefits, as well as contribute supplies to the cause. Malvina Reynolds, who wrote that splendid little song, “Little Boxes,” performed there on the Rock, and what more perfect occasion for Buffy Sainte-Marie, a Cree Indian, to help her people?
Buffy, however, spent a frustrating weekend in the Bay Area trying to arrange transportation to Alcatraz Island. She was turned down by boat charting services, rental services and even the police. She reports (very seriously) that the only way people can get to the island is by swimming.
Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Bay, California, 1970
The occupation of Alcatraz Island by the group Indians of All Tribes lasted for nineteen months, from November 20, 1969, to June 11, 1971, and was forcibly ended by the U.S. government.
February 20, 1970 (29 Years)
July 18, 1970
Redding Record and the Courier Free Press Newspaper
What in the World
Getting It All Together Indian singer-composer-guitarist Buffy Sainte-Marie, well known for her renditions of the music of her people, told Family Weekly of her childhood, a time when she was not yet in tune with herself. Orphaned when a few months old, Buffy was adopted from the Plains Cree tribe of Saskatchewan, Canada, by a Micmac (Canadian Indian) mother and a European father.
[PAY ATTENTION TO THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT BY BUFFY]
“I idolized my brother [Alan Keith St. Marie], who is blond. It was the hardest thing for me to understand why I didn’t look like him. All through high school in New England I tried to make myself look like the models pictured in the teen-age fashion magazines. I bleached my hair and wore light make-up. But somehow it didn’t work at all.” Now of course, Buffy has found herself – and her heritage – and carries it “with pride.”
April 05, 1970
The Detroit Free Press Newspaper, Page 17-A
September 12, 1970
The Native People, Page 3
Buffy Brightens Turtleford Reserve School Prospects
Miss Buffy Sainte-Marie was born a Canadian Indian but adopted by Caucasian parents at the age three, she grew up in rural Maine and Massachusetts. Encouraged to explore her Cree Indian origins, she alternated between life on the reserve and “the dark-skinned girl in a white world.”
October 17, 1970
Le Presse (Montreal) Newspaper, Page 3C
Buffy Sainte-Marie and the Indians
LOS ANGELES (PA) - “Why couldn't an Indian-born be a model, or a designer or a painter?” asks Buffy Sainte-Marie, Indian Cree singer from Canada. “Who is the child who likes to be told at school that his grandfather was a savage?”
At present, Indians cannot survive, physically, mentally, emotionally or artistically in America. The 29-year-old Cree singer said in an interview that her songs have helped white people understand Indians, but they still haven't done anything to remedy their plight. Buffy Sainte-Marie intends to do everything to get there: to come.
December 30, 1970
The (Long Beach, CA) Independent Press-Telegram Newspaper, Page 15
By Herbert Kupferberg
Buffy Sainte-Marie: She Sings Out for Her Indian People
Buffy, who is a full-blooded Cree Indian herself, fights for her people with her voice, her personality, and her mouth. She’s got plenty of each, because she’s become one of the most successful folk singers in the business, with particular appeal to the campus crowd and other young people.
Herbert Kupferberg, in the article, makes mention of her “exotic black eyes” and her “raven-black hair.”
Buffy, who was born in Canada, a member of the Cree tribe, was orphaned as a baby and raised by an Indian couple from another tribe, the Micmac. She spent her childhood in New England, going to high school in Wakefield, Massachusetts.
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