Soundlab Reflections

Reflection 5 & 6

“Now That The Buffalo’s Gone” - Buffy Sainte-Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie is an Indiginous Canadian-American singer/songwriter who was born on the Piapot Plains Cree First Nation Reserve in the Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, Canada.  Abandoned as a baby, she was adopted by a Mi’kmaq couple from Wakefield, Massachutetts. 

Buffy Sainte-Marie’s work has focused on issues of Indigenous peoples of North America. Her repertoire includes subjects of love, war, and religion.  Sainte-Marie is a self taught pianist and guitarist. In her early twenties, Sainte-Marie had already toured various concert halls, folk festivals, and Native American Reserves across North America. In 1964, Buffy Sainte-Marie was named Billboard Magazine’s Best New Artist.  Her songs have been covered by many successful artists such as Donovan, Janis Joplin, and Courtney Love. She won an Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 55th Academy Awards for co-writing the song "Up Where We Belong". She was the first and still is the only Indigenous person to have won an Academy Award. 

 Buffy Sainte-Marie regularly appeared on the popular children’s TV show Sesame Street from 1976-1981.  When asked why she chose to appear on the show, Sainte-Marie said it was to show children across the nation that “Indians still exist”.  In 1997, she founded the Cradleboard Teaching Project, an educational curriculum devoted to better understanding Native Americans. 

  “Now That The Buffalo’s Gone” is the first track on her 1964 album, titled “It’s My Way!”. The song's title refers to the near-extinction of the American bison, which is a metaphor for the cultural genocide of Native Americans, inflicted by Europeans.  The protest song is a simple arrangement with guitar and vocals by Sainte-Marie. 

 The song addresses the continuous confiscation of Indian lands by the government.  In the song, Sainte-Marie contrasts the treatment of post-war Germany, whose people were allowed to keep their “land and their dignity, to that of North American Indians”.   This line emphasizes how poorly the Native American people have been treated throughout history.  

Sainte-Marie mentions how the Treaty of Canandaigua was broken through the building of the Kinzua Dam.  The song also describes ongoing governmental attempts to wrest land from the Cheyenne, Iroquois and Seneca peoples. 

The Treaty of Canandaigua is a treaty signed after the American Revolutionary War between the Grand Council of the Six Nations and President George Washington representing the United States of America.  The treaty established peace and friendship between the United States of America and the Six Nations, and affirmed Haudenosaunee land rights in the state of New York, and the boundaries established by the Phelps and Gorham Purchase of 1788. 

The Kinzua Dam, on the Allegheny River in Warren County, Pennsylvania, is one of the largest dams in the United States.  It is located within the Allegheny National Forest.  The dam created Pennsylvania's second deepest lake, the Allegheny Reservoir. Federal condemnation of tribal lands to be flooded for the project displaced more than 600 Seneca members and cost the reservation 10,000 acres, nearly one-third of its territory and much of its fertile farmland.  In her song “Now That The Buffalo’s Gone”,  Sainte-Marie addresses this issue and the fact that it was in complete violation of the Treaty of Canandaigua. 

After listening to this song, I feel more informed about the injustice that Canadians have practiced on the many Indigious cultures in Canada.  Buffy Sainte-Marie is an excellent example of someone who is using her culture to help educate Non-Indigious people about Indiginous rights and culture, and how important it is to be respectful of Indiginous culture and to be aware of their history.  It is important that we have artists like Buffy Sainte-Marie who remind us of the history of wrongdoings against the Indiginous people in North America, and the sacrifices their people had to make. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Saintr-Marie’s album,  and I believe her music, as well as her culture, is something that should continue to be taught in canadian classrooms for years to come.