HEYOKA MAGAZINE. BUFFY SAINTE MARIE (original) (raw)
Buffy Sainte Marie
Buffy Sainte Marie was Born at Piapot (Cree) Indian Reserve in the Qu'Appelle Valley of Saskatchewan. She was raised in Maine and Massachusetts and received a Ph.D. in Fine Art from the University of Massachusetts. She also holds degrees in both Oriental Philosophy and teaching. As a college student in the early 1960s and 70s, Buffy Sainte-Marie became known as a writer of bone penetrating protest songs and soul piercing love songs (times of civil disobedience, psychedelic Flower Power, nuclear proliferation and the Vietnam war).
Virtually alone, she toured North America's poverty stricken reservations, college campuses and packed concert halls, singing and affecting hearts and souls, young and old, igniting consciences and creating awareness along the way. She encountered vast critical acclaim and also critical misunderstanding from audiences and record labels who anticipated a profit-making "Pocahontas in Fringes", and not the raw talent and gut wrenching dose of Native Indian medicine wrapped in a parcel of genetic Cree poetry, wisdom and with the voice of an angel.
By the age of 24, Buffy Sainte-Marie had extensively traveled and appeared all over Europe, Australia, Canada, and Asia, receiving numerous awards, high honors, medals and her songs such as "Until It's Time for You to Go" were recorded by Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand and Cher. Her "Universal Soldier" became the world's anthem of the peace movement protesting Vietnam along with Bob Dylan's "Masters of War".
She disappeared suddenly from the mainstream airwaves during the Lyndon Johnson years as a result of her social activism and was blacklisted with others such as Eartha Kitt, Taj Mahal, Lenny Bruce and a medley of other outspoken singer songwriters artists and performers. Her name was included on White House stationery as among those whose music "deserved to be suppressed". In Indian country and in the rest of the world her fame grew as she still continued to appear at grassroots concerts, AIM events and other activist benefits.
While still in her twenties, Buffy established a scholarship foundation to fund Native American studies; she spent time with indigenous people in distant countries, received a medal from Queen Elizabeth II and even presented a colloquium to Europe's philosophers. She has made more than 17 albums, three of her own television specials, spent five years on Sesame Street, scored movies and helped to found Canada's 'Music of Aboriginal Canada' JUNO category. She raised a son, taught Digital Music as an adjunct professor at several colleges and won an Academy Award for the song "Up Where We Belong".
She is also a pioneer in the computerised digital arts as well as computerized music. Begun in 1984, Buffy Sainte-Marie's dazzling large scale digital works were among the first to be seen in museums and galleries across North America. Her illuminescent images are re-created as limited edition Ilfordchrome photographic prints,ranging in size from two feet to nine feet high.
She describes her electronic paintings as "Painting with Light". Beginning in her "wet" studio with regular brushes and paper/canvas, she imports images into her Macintosh at home in Hawaii, and the works become digital. Using mainly Photoshop software, she combines a vast range of kaleidoscopic colours with occasional pieces of scanned-in apparitional Edward R. Curtis lookingphotographs of native Dakota warriors, a Yaqui dancer, an Arapaho elder; dressed with feathers and adorned withbeads, fur and bones to create large radiantly lit vibrant computerized paintings which she also describes as being "both reflective and deep, like new car paint". Once she's turned the images into photographs, she paints them with discreet applications of metallic dyes. They begin and end in the "real studio", but the middle is a combination of photography and digital pixel painting.
The life-size Ilfordchrome photos of paintings such as "Elder Brothers" are saturated in a metallic sea of neon "Liquid Sunshine" swirling like psychedelic gasoline patterns floating on water; bringing to mind William Wordsworth's "The pleasures the mind derives from the similitude in dissimilitude".
As in her music - which goes from the primitive voice and mouthbow - to electronic scores and hightech delivery, it is Buffy's use of the ancient conjoined with thetechnological, the intuitional with the empirical, her emotional abandon with her cool cerebral ancient philosophies, which give these paintings a melodious equilibrium and spiritual akari. These works have ingrained authenticity and polyphonic attributes as if made by electromagnetic tessellations to the music of Bach or the tranquillizing flute playing of R.Carlos Nakai.
After all these years, Buffy's art and music is still full of passion and joy that one can hear in her breathtaking voice can also be seen in her radiant "Paintings with Light".
John LeKay September 2005