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Artist
Buffy Sainte-Marie
12+ albums
folksinger-songwriternative americanfemale vocalists60s
about
Buffy Sainte-Marie, OC (born Beverly Jean Santamaria, February 20, 1941) is a American female vocalist 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. In 1997, she founded the Cradleboard Teaching Project, an educational curriculum devoted to better understanding Native Americans. She has won recognition and many awards and honours for both her music and her work in education and social activism. Sainte-Marie was born at the New England Sanitarium and Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts, to parents Albert Santamaria and Winifred Irene Santamaria, who later changed their name to 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 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, who added to Sainte-Marie's cultural value of, and place in, native culture. In 1968, she married surfing teacher Dewain Bugbee of Hawaii; they divorced in 1971. She married Sheldon Wolfchild from Minnesota in 1975; they have a
