51 f
“I don’t think the world has changed very much since before the Old Testament, you know, when bullies ruled. It started in the Middle East, and the pattern was picked up in Europe. Patterns of oppres- sion are very old and very widespread just because of colonialism, to the point that a lot of people in the world still suffer from the kind of bullying style that took over Europe through the churches and the seri- al-killer kings.”
“For an indigenous person to look at European history, it’s a horror comic. When we think about the Residential Schools – just read Charles Dickens! That’s the way those people treated their own children. They bought and sold children. It was part of the cultural aberrations of the time and place, and widespread. So the songs I write have kind of a universal feel. I think the history of folk music is similar in that way. The songs are about universal things: oppression, love, war, the countryside.”
“So, lucky me to be a young songwrit- er in that kind of atmosphere and that kind of first global awakening of students and music and food and dance and music festivals. It was kind of a perfect storm for me, very beautiful, and I really owe a lot to the people who live and preserve and per- form and revitalise the ancient songs of the world. Medicine Songs also reflects that – the songs are about a lot of differ- ent things but they do have a basic com- mon sense, and high human values.”
A
quick pause for another ques- tion – about writing the album’s most radical song, 1964’s unflinching My Country ’Tis Of Thy People You’re
Dying. Half-spoken and half-sung, it’s a poetic litany of outrage, which in its title and chorus subverts one of the great US patriotic anthems. Buffy dared to call the disappearance of indigenous peoples and cultures on Turtle Island by its true name.
“Where in your history books is the tale / Of the genocide basic to this coun- try’s birth / Of the preachers who lied, how the Bill of Rights failed / How a nation of patriots returned to their earth?
For a young Native American woman to write such a song at that time showed incredible courage.
“Like Universal Soldier, line by line it’s a list of facts. And I made it bulletproof. If you’re going to write something like that you have to think like a front-line New York Times journalist – you have to back it up with facts. So I’ve got a whole bibliog- raphy of some of these songs. If they were just fiction they’d be another kind of song, and I write a lot of songs that are based in fiction. The ones on Medicine Songs are not. It’s still art but… they’re not just documentaries, there is some poetry involved. I won’t say ‘poetic licence’ because I do try to make them bulletproof.”
Risking an outrageous pun I ask whether there was any particular trigger that impelled her to write it.
“Terrible pun,” she responds, laugh- ing. “It was on my third album, I believe, and I had written Universal Soldier and Now That The Buffalo’s Gone, and Bill- board had me as their best new artist of 1964, the year The Beatles came to Ameri- ca. I was kind of big news – on all the big TV shows and magazine covers. I’d been travelling around, not only in the US and Canada but in the UK and Europe, Aus- tralia, Japan, and Hong Kong. And in New York I got wind that here were these well- heeled people coming down to Greenwich Village to see the little Indian girl that’d make you cry. Oh boy. “
“That just broke my heart, that made a big change in me. In the first place I wanted to bring a rock band to a reserva- tion because they did not need to hear protest songs, and I started writing things like He’s An Indian Cowboy In The Rodeo. But I did want to give people what I thought they needed, which in my opinion was Indian 101 in five-and-a-half minutes because those people coming just to see a victimised Indian, so I believed, wanted to know. What I sensed in those audiences was – if they only knew, they’d try to make it better. I really did believe that when I wrote Now That The Buffalo’s Gone, when I wrote Universal Soldier, and when I wrote My Country ’Tis Of Thy People
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