Canadian Council on Learning | Conseil Canadien sur l'Apprentissage

When Buffy Sainte-Marie reflects on her more than four decades as a singer/songwriter, one early experience jumps to mind. When she was just three, she remembers listening to Tchaikovsky on her family’s record player and being so moved that she marched over to a piano and played it back note for note.

“I'm a natural musician,” the Academy Award-winner explained recently from her mountain-top home in Hawaii. “I didn't take any lessons—I was self-taught. But being self-taught is a double-edged thing.” Despite her obvious talent, Sainte-Marie—who will receive the Lifetime Contribution to Aboriginal Music award at this month’s Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards—is unable to read music.

In fact, when the Saskatchewan-born Cree musician was growing up in New England in the 1940s and 1950s she failed all of her music courses in school. “In Grade 5, 6 and 7, when they're trying to teach you about notes and sharps and flats, I couldn't figure out what that had to do with music.”

It wasn't until Sainte-Marie was an adult that she admitted this to a professor at the Berkeley College of Music, where her son was taking classes. The professor told her she was not alone in being able to write and perform music, but unable to read it back. With a little research, she discovered that her condition even had a name: dysmusica, a musical form of dyslexia.

“Boy, was it ever a great boost for me to realize that there are other very talented musicians who can't read music [either].” Sainte-Marie says. The revelation was just one in a series in the life of the trailblazing performer.

As one of the A-list stars of Canada’s folk scene during the 1960s, Sainte-Marie toured the world alongside Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen performing her politically charged songs like Universal Soldier and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (not to mention penning best-selling songs for others, such as Until It's Time for You to Go and Up Where We Belong). But her love of performing was matched only by her other passion in life, teaching.

Despite an exasperating experience in high school, she says she was mesmerized by the infinite learning possibilities available to her when she enrolled in the University of Massachusetts.

“I only went to college on a trial basis; just to get out of town.” But she stuck around, graduating in 1962 with a degree in Oriental philosophy and one in teaching.

Her plan at the time was to abandon her budding career singing in coffeehouses, and take up the life of a teacher on native reservations across the continent. She says her dream was derailed when she had to contend with the layers of government bureaucracy in the reservation system both in Canada and her adoptive country of the US.

Yet, Sainte-Marie never fully lost her love of teaching. As her fame grew and she mounted one concert tour after another, she always put aside time to visit First Nations communities where she has worked with Aboriginal kids. To her, it was simply a way of contributing to her community without having to suffer the constraints she believed the federal departments running education on reserves imposed.

Her dedication shows in The Cradleboard Teaching Project. Founded in 1996 with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the program fosters learning about Aboriginal cultures by developing curriculum that complements what Canadian and American kids learn in school.

Cradleboard is administered by another Sainte-Marie project; the Nihewan Foundation which she created in 1969 to support Native American students and educators via scholarships, teacher training programs and curriculum development. Her Cradleboard program was shaped by Sainte-Marie's own experiences as a learner. She was determined to counter the cultural stereotypes that she encountered, particularly based on visual images of native people in costume, reinforced by “dead text about dead Indians.”

“The big challenge for aboriginal people is always that we're stereotyped in time,” she explains. “People seem to like us better if we dress like we did in the 1700s; yet white people aren't expected to dress like Benjamin Franklin.”

Sainte-Marie's goal is to provide children with the chance to get to know real Aboriginal children living on real reserves. An early proponent of computers and the internet (she considers Tim Berners-Lee, the head of a group at MIT that is credited with creating the internet, as a personal hero) she was quick to use the web as a way to connect Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal schools around the world. A decade ago, she paired up St. Regis School in Akwesasne, Quebec with Adrya Siebring's Island School in Hawaii and allowed students to communicate through email and early version of live chat programs—a use of technology that was years ahead of its time.

Today, the Cradleboard Project has grown to include online curricula written by and about Aboriginals that is designed to be incorporated into social studies classes. She even offers DVDs that explain subjects like geography and science from an Aboriginal perspective. She says the DVDs appeal to both traditional learners and more visual learners, which she says many Aboriginal children are. Students can use computers to answer questions and score their own tests. Through her science curriculum, they use the same kind of slider that recording studios use to change frequencies and pitches, and can watch sound waves form, while learning about frequency and amplitude.

Inspired by Berners-Lee, who envisioned the internet as universally free, Sainte-Marie now provides all of Cradleboard’s materials for free and has since lost count of the “thousands and thousands” of teachers and students who use them.

Sainte-Marie's dedication to this project is rooted in her belief that many kids are “imprisoned in schools instead of engaged,” especially those who like her, have learning disabilities that go undiagnosed. “There are all kinds of kids in the world who are super-talented, and [traditional] education can't do everything for them,” she says.

She believes that many adults and traditional schools often suppress children's natural creativity.

“Along about Grade 3 we learn that trees are supposed to look like broccoli and music is really about sharps and flats and notes,” she says “But it's not.”

Sainte-Marie's most significant learning experiences have come as much from negatives as positives, she says. Although she was born a member of the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan's Qu'Appelle Valley, Sainte-Marie was adopted and moved to a largely white community in Maine where the only aboriginal person she remembers encountering was her family's mail carrier.

“I had a hard childhood—I was kind of withdrawn into myself, into self-expression through the arts.”

Being raised in a non-native community had both its benefits and drawbacks. "[It was] positive, in that I got to know a majority people [Caucasians] as I may not have gotten to know them—for better or worse—in a mono-racial or mono-ethnic community."

“However, growing up in that town I was actually told that I couldn't be an Indian, because there weren't any more Indians. Like many other people in that situation, I just kept quiet and learned what I could.”

Though Sainte-Marie's mother didn't know much about aboriginal people, she encouraged her daughter to educate herself about her culture and cautioned that much of what she would see in the media was laden with stereotypes or just plain wrong.

Once Sainte-Marie's musical career took off, her travels enabled her to experience contemporary aboriginal life—and to reassure herself, and others, that Indians were not relegated to museums like the dinosaurs. She established ties in aboriginal and non-aboriginal communities.

“From the very beginning of my career, I had this lovely blend of multi-ethnicity—indigenous people and colonized people,” she says. Her experience taught her that people liked each other, regardless of culture. But mainstream teachers lacked materials that did not fuel stereotypes and inaccuracies about aboriginal people—and aboriginal people suffered from the misperceptions the education system perpetuated.

Through Cradleboard, Sainte-Marie hopes to have found a way to bridge the divide between two cultures by taking advantage of the technology she had long embraced.

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