Day 4 - 307 -- Poetry for Thought

Friday - another day filled with classes and meetings. Fatigue set in by the end of the day. Yet, I headed over to the auditorium with hopes of getting a seat for the speaking event. Buffy Sainte Marie spoke as part of the McKenna Leadership series. A documentary bio was shown first, after which she spoke about her social justice work over the decades. At 76, she displayed a passion for life and desire to move social issues forward. She spoke of protesting experiences and a sense of needing to uphold Mother Earth. The room was overfull with many indigenous and non-indigenous listeners.

I was taken by her approach to the guilt and bitterness resulting from the centuries of injustice from colonizers. She told a story of ancestors walking the plains and picking something up and placing it into baskets -- buffalo chips. She noted these dried pieces of manure were used to start fires, which can bring people together to talk or sing, provide light to read a book (or write a book), and provide warmth. Rather than using energy to hang on to the negative feelings, she recommended that we find a way to use that energy to gather together, support one another and channel that negative energy into a positive endeavour. Or we could scatter the chips as fertilizer and grow somethings new. I love this metaphor. From something that seems nasty and unusable, we can turn it into something beautriful and useful. She brought indigenous peoples to every household through her time on Sesame Street, where she and her husband and then their infant son portrayed a growing family. She breastfed her son during an episode, to normalize the process with Big Bird looking on. I enjoyed the thoughts she shared during the evening, many of which might have been uncomfortable, but they brought ideas into the open -- ideas that need to be pondered by all.

The musical part of her career was not ignored. The documentary included much of this history along with the advocacy aspects. She has written many songs that are well known. She won an Oscar for "Up Where We Belong" and also wrote "Until its time for you to go", which has been covered by many very well known singers. This blog featured her singing "Universal Soldier" a few weeks ago. She was from Saskatchewan, but was taken and adopted by a family in the eastern US. Later she returned to Saskatchewan and became part of the family of descendants of Chief Piapot. The pictures of the land along with stories and songs made me feel a bit homesick.

I share two of her songs here today. The first is a love song that became more mainstream than her protest songs. It was one that she was often asked to sing on talk shows, but only if she did not speak about her advocacy work. She turned them down <smile>. This was one of the first songs to use the bridge in the middle rather than only the repeating of verse and chorus. I chose a version from early in her career for this song. The second song is one that addresses her anti-war sentiments, with a more recent version chosen. Each song demonstrates her amazing vibrato styling.  Enjoy!

Until its time for you to go -- Buffy Sainte Marie

Soldier Blue -- Buffy Sainte Marie