“It Takes The Racism Out Of It”

Three words I first heard in the 1960s, have continued to stir my soul ever since.

Buffy Sainte-Marie.

With deep Saskatchewan Indian roots, long used to being pulled up and transplanted, Buffy grew up in Massachusetts in an adopted family and flowered in the folk scene in New York alongside Joni Mitchell, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan.

I am eternally grateful to my older brother, Jon, who bought Buffy’s first album (I was too cheap) and allowed me to really dig that distinctive quavering voice and trench deep into the lyrics.

Now That the Buffalos Gone was a protest song first released in 1964 against the grabbing of Aboriginal land which continues to the present. In the sixties, I was a tentative fledgling, testing the strength of branches and new feathers and I was amazed at the seeming audacity of a young Buffy, flying straight into grievances buried by history and warbling about them clearly and melodiously. Enchanting her audience as she protested.

She directed the song to those who may have Aboriginal roots:

Can you remember the times

That you have held your head high

And told all your friends of your Indian claim

Proud good lady and proud good man

Some great great grandfather from Indian blood came

And you feel in your heart for these ones

She refers to the German defeat in 1945 and then asks what has been done to the original landowners in North America (‘these ones’ in the last line):

When a war between nations is lost

The loser we know pays the cost

But even when Germany fell to your hands

Consider dear lady, consider dear man

You left them their pride and you left them their land

And what have you done to these ones

She ends with a call to action:

It's here and it's now you can help us dear man

Now that the buffalo's gone

Not only was she brave, but this descendant of Chief Payipwat, born on the Piapot Reserve in Saskatchewan in 1941, was also gorgeous with facial features immediately reminiscent of an Edward Curtis photograph. She was at once feminine and strong, self-confident, cosmopolitan, and killing them on the world stage. Buffy was gentle, yet, she put it all on the line in her art. She single handedly made a lie of Indian stereotypes on every front.

Hearing Universal Soldier for the first time stopped me dead in my tracks. It was as serious as a song could get! It was outspoken!! It was also crafted with absolute wisdom and precision. How could a Cree from Canada have the courage to sing in the face of the American war machine and the Indian racism of the day? I was a teenager exploring my own tiny pockets of courage to face the TV cameras in my feeble protests at Calgary School Board meetings against repressive high school teachers…. and here was Buffy going against the larger order of the day. A woman, an Aboriginal, standing up to the President’s plans! Although Buffy wrote the song in 1962 during the cold war of Khrushchev and Kennedy it was the sight of injured soldiers returning from the early ‘secret’ days of the Vietnam war that was her sudden inspiration.

She starts the song with the verification of the concept of “Universal”. We see ourselves and everyone else, regardless of race or creed, carrying the same bloody cudgel! This theme has been Buffy’s message to the world ever since…and she is now 74 years old; that we are all one human family, and there is always something that can be done about our dysfunction.

He's five feet two and he's six feet four

He fights with missiles and with spears

He's all of thirty-one and he's only seventeen

He's been a soldier for a thousand years

He's a catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jane

A Buddhist and a Baptist and Jew

And he knows he shouldn't kill and he knows he always will

You'll for me my friend and me for you

And he's fighting for Canada, he's fighting for France

He's fighting for the USA

And he's fighting for the Russians and he's fighting for Japan

And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way

Bingo! Fighting for peace was the main argument for decades as Europe and then the whole world clashed in worldwide war. Twice! My own father bombed Dresden and felt justified within the philosophy that Hitler had to be stopped at all costs. My feelings of fear/anger took expression as fights against parents, school, and authority; even my older and younger siblings. Of course, I believed I had to fight or I would be swallowed whole! Official pamphlets and drills, teaching us how to shelter from atomic bomb blasts, did little to assuage either feeling.

And he's fighting for democracy he's fighting for the reds

He says it's for the peace of all

He's the one who must decide who's to live and who's to die

And he never sees the writing on the wall

But without him how would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau

Without him Caesar would have stood alone

He's the one who gives his body as the weapon of the war

And without him all this killing can't go on

We are the machine!

When most people first heard the song, this is the place where their heads started to expand. The next lines blew their lids right off! Buffy circles back to inclusivity with a question asked of her ‘brothers’. She sets each of us squarely into the seat of responsibility …the universal ‘we’.

He's the universal soldier and he really is to blame

But his orders come from far away no more

They come from him and you and me and brothers can't you see

This is not the way we put an end to war?

Wisdom shines out of every line! Separating, into you and me, us and them, is the first step to war.

My own fears of authority extended outward and I imagined all sorts of dire consequences for her. I wondered if it was really possible for individuals to just-say-no in the face of the war machine. And yes, President Lyndon Johnson did not like what he heard and Buffy’s singing career was smothered by the back room operatives in the US. This, despite her years on Sesame Street as Big Bird’s friend, bringing an Aboriginal perspective to TV. She pushed this concept, alongside Jay Silverheels, by refusing to take on acting roles unless the TV networks in the 1970s cast Aboriginals instead of Italians and Arabs in the Indian roles. We in Canada, luckily, got to see Buffy perform more regularly than they did in the US, as she continued to sell and perform in Europe and Canada.

You tube has preserved some of the beloved scenes from Buffy’s five years on Sesame Street. Her episodes in a pickup truck in Taos teaching Big Bird about Indians or as a young mother breastfeeding Cody on TV as Big Bird looks on and asks his naïvely wonderful questions, are pure magic.

In 1997 I got my big chance to hang out with Buffy backstage. It was an outdoor concert and I had Teddy-the-Wonder-Dog along with me on a leash. After the show, I was invited ‘backstage’ by the organizer and stood quietly in the background, not wanting to force myself on the artist. I convinced myself that it was enough that I was in the same room with Buffy and there was no need to gather my courage, find my voice, and actually approach her. Suddenly, Buffy turned in my direction, her face lit up and she strode right across the room towards me! I was gobsmacked. I remember wiping my moist hand on my pant leg and preparing to gush something about my admiration for her singing. Instead, she fell on her knees at my feet, her arms flew around Teddy’s neck and she said, “what a beautiful dog, what a beautiful dog!”

Many months later, Teddy and I reconciled.

Buffy has always been an elder. Now her actual years have caught up, but she remains incredibly vibrant. A testament, perhaps, to her nondrinking, her belief in play instead of work and in her willingness to withdraw from the spotlights to recharge herself.

A speech she delivered in December 2013 at Arizona State University, awkwardly entitled, Detoxifying Aboriginal Self Perception and Outward Identity is as remarkable to me as her earlier songs. In her 40 minute talk, delivered without notes, she served up fresh concepts that stirred my coffee in a whole new direction.

Here, check out a portion for yourself.

After thanking her hosts and the people present, Buffy, the elder, began by saying,

“Some will tell you that what they really want is not on the menu.

Don’t believe them.

Cook it up yourself and then prepare to serve them.

That’s how they will learn.

Don’t stand in the kitchen and bitch that nobody is making what you want.

Make it, then show them how wonderful it is.”

She and Ghandi are definitely on the same page. “Be the change you wish to see.”

She continued with a story about the way we see things. Just as in the ‘60s when Buffy’s songs flew deep into the heart of things that really mattered, her reframing of history struck me with its elegant brilliance. As Wayne Dyer is fond of saying, “Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change”. Simple quantum physics.

I see this as yet another gift to the world from my hero, Buffy Sainte-Marie. I share it, verbatim, with you now.

Peace.

Buffy said, “In 1964, all of a sudden, everyone loved my little songs. Universal Soldier was one of them. There were many others and it was a really diverse kind of music….

All of a sudden, here I was with a career. All of a sudden, in 1964, ’65, I’m in my early 20s, I was a young singer with too much money. I was flying all over the place. I’d be one day in South Dakota on a reservation. I’d go to the airport and fly to Paris.

There were not too many Native American people who had that opportunity, but I did and I’m so grateful for it.

So don’t ever put me on a pedestal. I was the luckiest of anybody.

I got to see the world without leaving the Rez. I got to bring the Rez to the Europeans and I got to bring the glitz and shine to the reservations.

It was always a pleasure to be with people. I’d be in Stockholm or London or Rome or someplace and there would be audiences who wanted to know about the people back home.

And that really touched me.

I never became the kind of Indian who was protesting because I was racist against white people. I wasn’t like that.

I always felt sorry for white people, especially in Europe.

(Laughter)

Well, no, think of it. This is what they never tell you in school. They never tell you in University. I don’t know one University who has the guts to say the way it really was. I mean what was it that got off that boat?

Conquistadors!

What were they drinking?

Orange Juice? Coca Cola?

No, we were attacked by gangs of alcoholics, who themselves were oppressed by a feudal system ... it hit them before it ever got to us.

There were serial killers on the thrones of Europe and nobody says it! There were serial killers on the thrones of Europe!

That is what was going on in Europe.

Ferdinand and Isabella.

It was the inquisition.

And nobody ever says it in Native Studies!

We were discovered during the inquisition.

It was the worst possible time for European people to be going all over the world and meeting the indigenous people of the world.

It was terrible timing, but it wasn’t because they were white, it was bad leadership.

Every now and then you can get bad leadership in a group.

That’s what was going on.

It takes the racism out of it.

It wasn’t that they were Europeans. They were being oppressed by those same people. Their job was to come over and oppress indigenous people where they found them. They didn’t know.

The same time in Europe, Henry VIII was on the throne. He did not just kill a few wives my friends. Hundreds of thousands of people, tortured, murdered, because he wanted it.

In Eastern Europe, Vlad the Impaler was on the throne when American Indians were ‘discovered’.

Charming!

Vlad the Impaler!

Its Dracula!

That’s what happened and nobody says it.

Say it!

Because it takes the racism out of it.

Bad leadership.

We need good leadership. We need it in our communities, we need it in our homes.

We have a dysfunctional world. We can fix it.

Good leadership! Start it in the home. Start it in the community. Teach it in the schools. It is good.”

D. Sam Hall

August 2015