"Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee": Oral Tradition, Native American Activism and Buffy Sainte-Marie's Folk Songs

This paper demonstrates how Cree singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, by means of her folk songs that register oral traditional devices, offered a crucial voice to "Red Power" in the 1960s and 1970s, by examining the wide-range of her folk songs within the legacy of the era. The songs are based on the common American Indian worldview that stresses the interaction between personal voices and collective ones within the inclusive function of oral tradition that builds a community of teller-listeners in the process of a storytelling. Her songs' forms of storytelling exemplify resistance to assimilation into mainstream history, regularly drawing on poetry's roots in song and chant. The lyrics of Sainte-Marie's folk songs, in particular, correspond to the rhetorics and expressions of Red Power, and with poetic expressions, register issues specific to local, national protests and concerns of Relocation and Termination policy, broken treaties, tribal homelands, responses to the harsh urban landscape, and struggles with Native identity. The Cree singer-songwriter expands the boundaries of the stories by appealing to both male and female activists and by developing pan-Indian perspectives. This paper, therefore, indicates that Sainte-Marie's folk songs epitomized protest songs concerning real issues that contemporary American Indians confronted, a creative activism that targeted and condemned ongoing colonialism in the US.