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Academy Award winner Buffy Sainte-Marie was a graduating college senior in 1962 and hit the ground running in the early Sixties, after the beatniks and before the hippies. All alone she toured North America's colleges, reservations and concert halls, meeting both significant acclaim and huge misperception from audiences and record companies who expected Pocahontas in fringes, and instead were both entertained and educated with their initial dose of Native American reality in the first person.

By age 24, Buffy Sainte-Marie had appeared all over Europe, Canada, Australia and Asia, receiving honours, medals and awards, which continue to this day. Her song "Until It's Time for You to Go," was recorded by Elvis Presley, Bobby Darin, Barbara Streisand and Cher, and her Universal Soldier became the anthem of the peace movement. For her very first album she was voted Billboard's "Best New Artist." She disappeared suddenly from the mainstream American airwaves during the Lyndon Johnson/Richard Nixon years. As part of a blacklist, which affected Eartha Kitt, Taj Mahal and a host of other outspoken performers, her name was included on White House stationery as among those whose music "deserved to be suppressed."

In Native American country and abroad, however, her fame only grew. Buffy Sainte-Marie continued to appear at countless grassroots concerts, AIM events and other activist benefits. She made 17 albums of her music, three of her own television specials, spent five years on Sesame Street, scored movies, helped found Canada's "Music of Aboriginal Canada" Juno Awards category, raised a son, earned a Ph.D. in Fine Arts, taught Digital Music as adjunct professor at several colleges, and won an Academy Award Oscar for the song, "Up Where We Belong."

Buffy Sainte-Marie virtually invented the role of Native American international activist pop star. Her concern for protecting indigenous intellectual property and her distaste for the exploitation of Native American artists and performers have kept her in the forefront of activism in the arts for forty years. Presently she operates the Nihewan Foundation for Native American Education through which the Cradleboard Teaching Project serves children and teachers throughout North America.

RUNNING FOR THE DRUM
Buffy Sainte-Marie released her 18th album, Running for the Drum, in North America and throughout Europe, in 2009, to critical acclaim, “She is also one of the most successful and versatile songwriters of the last half-century” (The Guardian). Adding to an already expansive list of accolades and awards, Buffy Sainte-Marie won her second Juno Award for Aboriginal Album, Aboriginal’s People Choice Music Award (APCMA) for Best Folk Album, as well as became the 25th inductee into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame and the first person to receive the APCMA’s Lifetime Achievement award.

Reuniting with former co-producer, Chris Birkett (Coincidence and Likely Stories and Up Where We Belong), Buffy Sainte-Marie’s newest album was recorded in her home studio in Hawaii. Celebrated for her tremendous diversity in song-writing styles,Running for the Drum is a whip-lash collection of power and beauty: folk/roots, powwow-rock, rockabilly and dance.

Passionate as ever, Buffy Sainte-Marie uses her latest songs to cover an extensive array of commanding themes, including great loves and protest against environmental greed. Running for the Drum, like the artist herself, cannot be neatly categorized into a single musical genre; instead finding itself among a rare breed of pure music fusion.

LIVE IN CONCERT
Lauded for her stunning live performances, Buffy Sainte-Marie will be gracing stages across Europe and North America in 2010 with new songs, as well as her classics, “… whether raising the roof with No No Keshagesh, breaking our hearts with Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee or punching the mic for the rhythm of Relocation Blues, Sainte-Marie herself was magnificent” (Telegraph Journal).

Joining Buffy Sainte-Marie on the road will be a hot 5-piece all-Aboriginal band, which blends together the edgy rock n’ roll sound of a Winnipeg band, Gathering of Flies: Darryl Menow (Cree) - on bass and vocals, Jesse Green (Ojibwe) on guitar, and Mike Bruyere (Ojibwe) on drums and vocals; with the strong traditional roots of Ulali: Soni Moreno (Aztec, Yaqui and Mayan) and Jennifer Kreisberg (Tuscarora) on percussion and vocals.

“They’ve got the energy I need for driving songs like Starwalker and No No Keshagesh and it helps that what I sing about and where a lot of my songs originate is a world they know too: the realities of Native American passion, love, tragedy and music,” impresses Buffy Sainte-Marie.

Running for the Drum, in tandem with her DVD, Buffy Sainte-Marie: A Multimedia Life, is available through select online retailers, including iTunes and Amazon and in stores throughout Europe and North America.

Buffy Sainte-Marie @ Hillside from NOW Magazine on Vimeo.