Academy Award winner Buffy Sainte-Marie was a graduating college senior in 1962 and hit the ground running in the early Sixties, after the beatniks and before the hippies. All alone she toured North America's colleges, reservations and concert halls, meeting both significant acclaim and huge misperception from audiences and record companies who expected Pocahontas in fringes, and instead were both entertained and educated with their initial dose of Native American reality in the first person.

By age 24, Buffy Sainte-Marie had appeared all over Europe, Canada, Australia and Asia, receiving honours, medals and awards, which continue to this day. Her song Until It's Time for You to Go, was recorded by Elvis and Barbara and Cher, and her Universal Soldier became the anthem of the peace movement. For her very first album she was voted Billboard's “Best New Artist.” She disappeared suddenly from the mainstream American airwaves during the Lyndon Johnson/Richard Nixon years. As part of a blacklist, which affected Eartha Kitt, Taj Mahal and a host of other outspoken performers, her name was included on White House stationery as among those whose music "deserved to be suppressed."

In Native American country and abroad, however, her fame only grew. Buffy Sainte-Marie continued to appear at countless grassroots concerts, AIM events and other activist benefits. She made 17 albums of her music, three of her own television specials, spent five years on Sesame Street, scored movies, helped found Canada's “Music of Aboriginal Canada” JUNO category, raised a son, earned a Ph.D. in Fine Arts, taught Digital Music as adjunct professor at several colleges, and won an Academy Award Oscar for the song, Up Where We Belong.

Buffy Sainte-Marie virtually invented the role of Native American international activist pop star. Her concern for protecting indigenous intellectual property and her distaste for the exploitation of Native American artists and performers have kept her in the forefront of activism in the arts for forty years. Presently she operates the Nihewan Foundation for Native American Education through which the Cradleboard Teaching Project serves children and teachers throughout North America.

TODAY

Buffy Sainte-Marie recently completed her 18^th album, Running for the Drum, which was released through her own label, Gypsy Boy Music and distributed through EMI in Canada; a worldwide release is slated for 2009 in select markets.

Reuniting with former co-producer, Chris Birkett (Coincidence and Likely Stories and Up Where We Belong), Buffy Sainte-Marie’s newest album was recorded in her home studio in Hawaii.

Celebrated for her tremendous diversity in song-writing styles, Running for the Drum is a whip-lash collection of power and beauty: folk/roots, pow wow-rock, rockabilly and dance.

Passionate as ever, Buffy Sainte-Marie uses her latest songs to cover an extensive array of commanding themes, including great loves and protest against environmental greed. Running for the Drum, like the artist herself, refuses to be neatly categorized into a single musical genre; instead finds itself among a rare breed of pure music fusion.