Buffy Sainte-Marie
Buffy Sainte-Marie
Buffy Sainte-Marie, OCis a Native Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, composer, visual artist, educator, pacifist, and social activist. Throughout her career in all of these areas, her work has focused on issues of Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Her singing and writing repertoire also includes subjects of love, war, religion, and mysticism...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWorld Music Singer
Date of Birth20 February 1941
CountryUnited States of America
Buffy Sainte-Marie quotes about
song native-american issues
I sang a song in Hindi; nobody even knew what that was. Singing about Native American issues, nobody did that. I had no reason to want to copy anybody else. All I had was my originality.
joy poverty culture
There is so much joy in native culture but so much poverty. It's very disturbing.
peace light acres
All the lights on Broadway don't amount to an acre of green.
teacher philosophy careers
I had a teacher's degree and a degree in Oriental Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts. I thought I was going to India to study but all of a sudden, I had a career in music. It really surprised me.
art digital sides
Digital art software has empowered both the painterly side of photographers, and the photographer side of painters.
work-out paper computer
Another time factor is output: proofing and printing. That is, getting your work out of the computer and onto paper and having it satisfy you. It can be time consuming and expensive.
black-and-white computer fascinated
It was a black and white only computer at the time, but it kept me fascinated.
kids native-american usa
Instead of kids just hearing about beads and baskets and fringe, and about what 'was' and 'were,' we present Native American culture as a living contemporary culture.
art thinking guitar
Grab a guitar, put some kind of strings on it, a banjo string, then a violin string, then a guitar string, tune it any way you want, and make some noise, and see what you get. And work on it until you get something that you think is interesting. That's all there is to art for me.
people brave originality
Some people say I was very brave, but I really just didn't know any better. All I had was my originality.
light consistency easy
If I'm interrupted, it's just a minor inconvenience, but not a disaster, because it's easy to get back where I was: that is, the paint has not changed consistency; the light has not moved.
dream rooms
You have to leave room in life to dream.
eye exercise college
There is an exercise I teach at colleges: Get yourself a canvas and a bunch of acrylics and go into a very dimly lighted room. Dip a brush into one of the colors, slap it on the canvas, don't look, close your eyes, make a painting, don't look, turn the lights on and see what you've got. I think this releases people from the editor in their life that's always standing over their shoulder saying, "Oh, you don't have any talent; who do you think you are?"
kids asking done
By looking at the questions the kids are asking, we learn the scope of what needs to be done.