Buffy Sainte-Marie

To Original American Peoples

Buffy Sainte-Marie (Citizenship: Canadian, 1941 - adopted* by a Piapot family)

Buffy Sainte-Marie's Website In 2022 the documentary Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry it On was released

Watch this 5 minute youtube video by Democracy Now on Indigenous Day, presenting Buffy Sainte-Marie - included in Sisters. Workshops with Poems

Album Coincidence and Likely Stories (1993), where this song is included:

BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE © Buffy Sainte-Marie

When people ask, “What happened to the North American Indians in the 1880s?”, you can pretty much point to the robber barons of the time who needed to make a fortune in oil, gold and other precious metals. Simple greed in the hands of a powerful few who manipulated the media and politicians. When people ask, “What happened to the Indian movement of the sixties and seventies?”, you can pretty much point to the same motives a hundred years later, with uranium added to the list in very big print. The shocking information in this song is not new, but strung together; the events tell a story that most non-Indian people don’t know. Dedicated to Leonard Peltier, the memory of Anna Mae Aquash and Joseph Stuntz.

INTRO:
Indian legislation on the desk of a do-right Congressman
Now, he don’t know much about the issue
so he picks up the phone and he asks advice from the
Senator out in Indian country
A darling of the energy companies who are
ripping off what’s left of the reservations. Huh.

1.
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

chorus:
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Deep in the Earth
Cover me with pretty lies
bury my heart at Wounded Knee. Huh.

2.
They got these energy companies that want the land
and they’ve got churches by the dozen who want to
guide our hands
and sign Mother Earth over to pollution, war and
greed
Get rich… get rich quick.

chorus…

3. We got the federal marshals
We got the covert spies
We got the liars by the fire
We got the FBIs
They lie in court and get nailed
and still Peltier goes off to jail

chorus…

4.
My girlfriend Annie Mae talked about uranium
Her head was filled with bullets and her body dumped
The FBI cut off her hands and told us she’d died of
exposure
Loo loo loo loo loo

chorus…

We had the Goldrush Wars
Aw, didn’t we learn to crawl and still our history gets
written in a liar’s scrawl
They tell ‘ya “Honey, you can still be an Indian
d-d-down at the ‘Y’
on Saturday nights”

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Deep in the Earth
Cover me with pretty lies
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee. Huh!

Listen to Buffy Sainte-Marie talking about her dear lost friend, Anni Mae

*In 2023 Buffy Sainte-Marie was accused of being a pretendian, someone lying about being a Native Indian. This is true, she is a US American citizen from a white family, but it is true she was adopted by a Piapot family in Canada. Painful as this is, we wish to keep what is good, and Buffy Sainte-Marie contributed informed work so that people in the world could learn about the situation of the original inhabitants of America, who were invaded, subject to genocide and acculturization, and today, their survivors, still bear the stigmatization and poverty the new society imposed on their lives.