Multimedia Child: Buffy Sainte-Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie's Self-Portrait is an imposing image. "A photo was imported into my computer and I played with it," she explains simply in her notes. "It is a headshot where I was wearing a lightweight veil; black hair, blackened background; and streaks of very interesting computer colours in some feathers." In fact, you can barely distinguish her hair from the granite-black background: her stern features seem to emerge like some ghostly vapour, her eyes, staring intensely out, apparently belong not to a person but to a shadow. The feathers are brilliantly rainbow-coloured: pure and vivid, they dance at her lips like Pan's pipes. The juxtaposition of the commanding eyes and the joyful colours of the feathers is startling. How is one to read this woman through her self-portrait?

Eagle man
climbing the skies
red light of evening
falls like rain
rainbows my yarn
the sky is my loom
I will weave sunsets
later on

Sainte-Marie is no figure to be simplified and pigeon-holed. Born in a reservation in Saskatchewan, adopted and raised in Maine and Massachusetts, she holds a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, a degree in Oriental Philosophy and a Teaching degree. Her love song, Up Where We Belong, composed for the film An Officer and a Gentleman, earned her an Academy Award; her protest songs like Universal Soldier, an anthem of the sixties peace movement, earned her a place on Lyndon B. Johnson's blacklist. She appeared for five years on Sesame Street telling children about Native people, and in July of 1993 with the National Arts Center Orchestra at the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa, Canada, on small reservations across Canada ever since she's learned to play the guitar. Her songs have been recorded by everyone from Janis Joplin to the Boston Pops Orchestra, and she has released twelve albums of her own.

Icon and populist, she is a woman of tremendous power and casual grace. She welcomes me with an easy smile, but as soon as I've been ushered into the office I am pin-balled by her entourage: her manager, his assistant, the secretary, each introducing themselves cordially, ensuring that Buffy has something to drink, that the room is the right temperature. No one is fawning over her -- she is far too confident to need that kind of attention. This is merely the respect they consider her due.

She accepts it unassumingly, and it is no doubt this ability that allows her to bridge seemingly contradictory worlds: she assumes no contradiction. Now this singer-songwriter is also an internationally renowned visual artist, working with photographs, paints and digital art on her Macintosh computer which she unabashedly praises. "Sixteen million colours are hard to resist," she grins. Her Self-Portrait is part of Painting With Light, curated by Linda Genereux, exhibited at First Canadian Place in Toronto: the six-feet-tall images stopped the hyper-caffeinated traffic at York and Adelaide. With the dizzying number of hues at her disposal through PixelPaint, the paintings are so vividly coloured that they seem to emanate light. Painting With Light is no misnomer.

"I've been painting all my life, composing music all my life, writing all my life," says Sainte-Marie, explaining how she found her way into digital art. She followed her curiosity into the realm of digital music, recording the first ever totally electronic vocal album in 1967, multi-tracking mouthbows for the film Performance in the late seventies. Her last CD, Coincidences and Likely Stories, released in 1992, was recorded in her home studio on her Macintosh. She played all the melody and rhythm lines herself, and sent the music down the phone lines through her modem to her co-producer in London, England, where it went onto tape. Digital art was only a step away and, for Sainte-Marie, "a very natural progression."

"I think the definition of an artist includes the way we all are when we're five years old," muses Sainte-Marie. "If all of us in this building were to go to the beach with the mindset we had when we were five years old, we would make art. We'd make little houses. We'd make drama by pretending. We'd make pictures in the sand. We'd dance, we'd make rhythm. And children who are playing and expressing themselves through everything that they do are very close to the artistic spirit that most guides me."

She offers this essential analogy too many times to count, to record companies, art galleries, critics and reviewers who insisted on defining her by medium, by style, by race, by borders. "Artists," she proposes, "are the people who are able to resist the school system fragmenting us because it's convenient to do so, when the art teacher is in competition with the music teacher, and all creativity is in competition with the 'real' curriculum."

Sainte-Marie's work is instead buoyed by an exuberant playfulness and inventiveness. As a visual artist, she finds herself fascinated by the ever-multiplying permutations possible with computer arts, traditional painting materials and techniques, and the photographic process. She scans paintings into her computer, works on them, prints them, pastes onto them, plays with metallic colours, photographs them, alters images in darkroom, turn them into transparencies. The final images are frequently jarring, a little like seeing Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews step into a chalk painting on the sidewalk: one feels witness to an actual document of an impossible scene. Sainte-Marie knows and delights in this. She titles her piece The Trickster (a mischievous, dangerous, sacred figure in Native legends), believed to be "the only known photo of the Trickster." Although available as an Iris print, she can make it into a backlit, semi-opaque Ilfordchrome and frame it in a wooden, weathered window frame, so that it appears the Trickster has his face pressed up against the glass like some prankish child.

Her images force us to confront the societal stereotypes of the people of the First Nations. Pink Village depicts a Native elder watching over the village of tipis huddled in a valley, as fragmented, pixelated neon colours descend like a snowstorm. Elder Brothers presents us with what appears to be a faded turn-of-the-century photograph of two young men against a background of swirling, vibrant colours. And Neon Hula is a dazzling celebration of colour and form, depicting three dancing women, auras of neon outlining their bodies, and multitudes of small circles of neon like magnified pictures of cells on a microscope slide. Despite her mainstream appeal, Sainte-Marie has been tireless in her efforts to widen her spotlight to include her community. "The reality of the situation," she once said, "is that we're not all dead and stuffed in some museum with the dinosaurs: we are Here in this digital age."

She wryly comments that she's often felt compelled to paraphrase the model in the cosmetics ad, and beg, "Don't hate me because I'm digital." But she's eager to point out that she is not alone in her field, and that she has many mentors and colleagues. An old friend of hers - "a man with more smiles than teeth," she laughs - has been teaching traditional songs in Lakota through interactive computer courses. He is only one of thousands connected to the digital world. First Nations children from Baffin Island to Hawaii can exchange their life experiences and revelations through the partnership between the Cradleboard Teaching Project and Kids from Kanata. University professors and students can connect through the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, or AIHEC, which has begun its first interactive course via satellite on the History of American Indians. Dr. George Baldwin, President of American Indian Telecommunications, works to keep First Nations people aware and involved in decisions affecting reservation economies and educational and medical services. There are several Native research centres, including Big Sky Telegraph at Western Montana College; AIRONET, the American Indian Research Opportunities programs, a joint project of Montana State University and the Montana Tribal Colleges; and AISES, the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, operating out of Boulder, Colorado.

I learned a safety rule
I don't know who to thank
Don't stand between the reservation
And the corporate bank
They send in federal tanks
It isn't nice but it's reality

Concerns of accessibility are compounded, as the inevitable discussion of access to the technology is doubled with the historical denial of human rights to First Nations people. Sainte-Marie fleetingly addresses these with forthright anger. "There are the same old scammers -- scammers in the church, scammers in the banks, scammers in the school system. But there are also people who get right around all that." If we're curious about how access to the technology will be limited, we can read the news or the history books and uncover the precedents. She has them in her veins: this is a woman who was instructed not to talk about Native rights and not to even mention her peace songs when she appeared on The Tonight Show. Now she wants to envision the future.

"It's only the falsities of the hierarchical pecking order which runs most of our lives," she suggests, "and many of us are becoming aware that this is not the only way to run society. The community in many indigenous societies is a circle. It's not a pyramid with the more powerful oppressing whoever is beneath them. And that's why the Net is so important. Input from artists, from women, from rural people is so important, because the contribution of the entire human species make a much more rich, varied and real world than if a few corporations run it. And it is finally possible, with artists, American Indians, brilliant people, telepathic Australian aboriginals -- on-line."

Sainte-Marie points to First Nations people for examples of this new democracy and redefined community. The interactivity possible on the Net is a way to stop what she identifies as the "draining" of her community's most valuable people, the Elders. The Elders have much to teach, but are often exhausted by the long trips outside the reserves to the cities. The Net is a way for them to maintain the connection to those who look to them for advice and knowledge, which Sainte-Marie believes is vital not only to the Native community, but for others: it would be "a much-needed medicine" for the world.

It's evident that Sainte-Marie embraces the opportunity to nurture "brilliant people" through her teaching. "I love teachers," she beams. "They have a curiosity and an appreciation for people that is unique." One can easily see who the most influential people in Sainte-Marie's youth were.

She approaches teaching with the same spiritual playfulness as she does her art, along with a belief that creativity will express itself in a myriad of ways as long as the individual allows it. "My students of multi-media were discovering, through their daily use of the Macintosh, that the vestiges of their childhood musicality if they were painters, or their interest in sculpture if they were photographers, flourished again when they came to a Mac, because the basic skills needed were so similar. And through my students," she adds enthusiastically, "I'm finding that I'm not the only one who sees this concept of the multi-media child."

For the present, teaching is the only form of "interactivity" Sainte-Marie wants to engage in when it comes to digital art. When it comes to digital music, it's a different story -- "because I'm a lousy bass player!" she jokes -- but especially because she relies on her co-producer's input and assistance. Interactivity in digital art, she says dismissively, "is like Gee-Whiz science. It's fun to show that it can be done." Right now, however, she is focussed on exploring her visual art solo. "I'm so involved in my own work, in my own time," she sighs. "I only have one lifetime to show people the moments that are unique from my life experience. As it is, I can barely keep up with myself. One day I'm in Stockholm, and the next I'm in the Arctic Circle with the indigenous people herding reindeer."

In some aboriginal cultures, there is no separate word for "art"; there is no use for them as they are totally integral parts of their daily lives. The multi-media child, Sainte-Marie explains, is one who sees the distinction between one form of art and another as fluid, as one who experiences a kind of creative synaesthesia, where an expressive impulse that begins in one art form ends up in another. For her, the computer, with its versatility, is the perfect and only medium to satiate these impulses; it reflects the synaesthetic thinking and learning process that she imagines. "To me," she said at the Institute for American Indian Arts, "a Macintosh is a natural and easy to learn tool, and it belongs in the hands of our beadworkers and powwow singers, our linguists, our historians."

Wolf rider
You've seen her opening doors
She's a history turner
She's a sweetgrass burner
And a dog soldier
Ah hey way hey way heya

In Sainte-Marie's school, one can fail only by not following one's sense of curiosity and of play. It's a philosophy that students respond strongly to, feeling their own ambitions and strengths respected. And it's a philosophy that directly contributes to the further development of Native digital art. Her work as a teacher forms a vital link between her community, her activism and her art. "I want to encourage them to discover their potential, and strengthen their self-esteem, which has most probably been eroded," she says. "I want to connect them with the real deals that await First Nations people. I want to turn them on to the real excitement of real Indian people, as opposed to the Pocahontas line. I want to encourage their interest in computers, which I think ought to be in the hands of artists, not just in the hands of the suits. And I know that people of the ages of seventeen to twenty, which are usually the ages I am working with, have often been shat on by the corporate world." She slows down thoughtfully, "I guess the picture I want them to come away with is that there are alternatives to becoming a slave to the corporate mentality. And it takes courage, and knowledge, and self-esteem."