Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography

"Buffy Sainte-Marie is a beacon: she shows us how unwavering vision and fierce independence go hand-in-hand with the work of creating solidarity, community, justice, and beauty. This book is the captivating story of that achievement."
– Naomi Klein, author of No is Not Enough and This Changes Everything

“Buffy Sainte-Marie’s career is enormously more impressive and significant than has been acknowledged or understood. This book draws decades of incredible, world-changing accomplishments together to make an irrefutable case for her place among the rock ‘n’ roll and songwriting greats. Fuck yeah.”
– Tanya Tagaq, Inuk songwriter and throat singer; winner of the 2014 Polaris Prize for Animism as well as multiple Juno Awards.

“Long overdue, Andrea Warner’s expansive, authorized biography reveals the astonishing range and breadth of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s work as a musician and writer, activist, educator, and spiritual leader. Speaking to Warner in a series of in-depth conversations, Sainte-Marie describes her extraordinary life, working within the commercial music industry for more than five decades on her own terms. Avoiding the traps of success and image obsession, Sainte-Marie has brought Indigenous values and culture into mainstream media. She is a true star, and this book goes a long way toward showing us how and why.”
— Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker: A Biography

"A crucial and compelling book that further cements Buffy Sainte-Marie's place in music history."
– Jessica Hopper, author of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic

"Warner has composed an extraordinary portrait of one of our most extraordinary artists, a book that feels suffused with Buffy Sainte-Marie's personality and spirit."
– Sean Michaels, author of Us Conductors

"For me, Buffy Sainte-Marie will always be that beautiful, raw piece of energy that burst into a television studio and energized the darkness with her light.

I have known her through the years and yet only with this heartfelt and revealing book do I know all the details of Buffy Sainte-Marie that I had only guessed or that had been hinted: the dreadful, terrifying abuse she experienced as a tiny child; the misunderstanding and prejudice that she faced; the struggles to assert herself as Indigenous, and; her defiant affirmation as herself as a woman who could be known, simply, as 'Buffy.' Her female qualities gave her the strength and the power which we now understand as being the source of all the great things that have happened to her in her career.

I want anyone who has picked up this book to understand that only by reading a life like this—only by understanding the tremendous efforts that Buffy has made—can we come to the understanding of what we are and have been as a people. Buffy Sainte-Marie helped us to realize that not everything can be taken away. She made us realize that out of loss and denial can come enormous gifts and beauty."
– Adrienne Clarkson, 26th Governor General of Canada (1999-2005)