Pick a Day

Buffy Sainte-Marie Born

Singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie is born. According to her birth certificate, she's born Beverly Jean Santamaria in Stoneham, Massachusetts, but she claims to be Native-Canadian, born Beverly Sainte-Marie in Qu'Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan and adopted by a couple in Stoneham.

Raised in Massachusetts, Sainte-Marie earns degrees in teaching and philosophy from the University of Massachusetts, but is continually drawn to her childhood passion of creating music. In 1964, she makes waves in the folk community with the release of her debut album, It's My Way!, a scathing treatise on a variety of topics, including the mistreatment of Native Americans ("Now That The Buffalo's Gone") and the perpetuation of the Vietnam War ("Universal Soldier"). Her own drug addiction inspires the track "Cod'ine," which becomes a folk standard, with covers from Donovan, Janis Joplin, and The Charlatans. Although the album doesn't chart, it does earn her the title of Best New Artist by Billboard magazine. It also earns her the admiration of fellow folk musicians: Joni Mitchell writes her first song after she watches Sainte-Marie perform at the Mariposa Folk Festival that year. The incendiary release is also an indicator of what's to come in Sainte-Marie's career, which spans five decades. She's deeply committed to sharing the plight of Native Americans, with sorrowful tunes like "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" and "Soldier Blue" (the theme song to the 1970 film of the same name) documenting the violent atrocities endured by her people at the hands of white oppressors. At the same time, she's not afraid to venture into lighter pop fare, writing the Elvis Presley hit "Until It's Time For You To Go" and co-writing the An Officer and A Gentleman theme "Up Where We Belong." When the latter wins the Academy Award for Best Original Song, Sainte-Marie is recognized as the first indigenous person to ever win an Oscar. Sainte-Marie was already familiar to TV viewers through her appearances on Sesame Street throughout the late '70s, where she played a singer who taught kids about the joys of country life with "I'm Gonna Be A Country Girl Again," and demonstrated breastfeeding with the help of her infant son. But, curiously, despite her TV presence and a continuous stream of releases – including the experimental electronic album Illuminations – her career was relatively quiet in the States. Years later, she learned why: She had been blacklisted. "I found out 10 years later, in the 1980s, that President Lyndon B. Johnson had been writing letters on White House stationery praising radio stations for suppressing my music,” she told Indian Country Today in 1999. While President Johnson, and later President Nixon, upheld the ban on Buffy, it didn't stop the singer from becoming a folk icon who continues to fight for peace through her uncompromising music – only she doesn't quite see it that way. "When somebody says, 'Oh, Buffy, you're such a warrior for peace,' I stop them and say, 'No, I'm not really a warrior for peace. What I promote is alternative conflict resolution.'" In 2023, Sainte-Marie's ancestry is called into question by a CBC News report that uncovers her birth certificate and makes the case that she was never adopted. She responds with a press release sticking to her story. "My mother told me that I was adopted and that I was Native, but there was no documentation as was common for Indigenous children at the time," she writes.

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