Buffy Sainte-Marie vividly remembers the reaction she would get in the folk clubs of the 60s whenever she would perform her song Now That the Buffalo’s Gone, which lists a litany of persistent sins committed against Native peoples. “I would see the faces of all these very smart white people turn ashen,” she said. “They didn’t know anything about Indians, and they were flabbergasted to hear that all these things were still happening on their watch – even in New York! They’d say, ‘Oh, that little Indian girl must be mistaken.’ I was gaslighted by them all the time on that. And it was terribly, terribly painful.”
Even so, when Sainte-Marie talks about vexing subjects like this today she exudes an abiding sense of calm, punctuating even her most withering observations with a giggle that brings the listener in, as if to say, “can you believe we had to put up with all this crap?”
