Pushkin. This is talk easy. I'm San Francisco, so welcome to the show. Today I am joined by the legendary Buffy St Marie. For more than half a century

Buffy has been telling her story through songs, although not just her story but the story of her people.

Born on a Cree reserve in Saskatchewan Canada, she was removed from her family at a young age.

She doesn't know when exactly. She grew up with her adoptive

family in Massachusetts. She managed as well as anyone could given the conditions.

We get into all that early in this talk.

Come time for college, she attends the University of Massachusetts, where she earned double degrees

in teaching and Oriental philosophy.

As she left school for New York City,

she would inject those two majors

into her songwriting.

Part educational, part philosophical,

Buffy began playing music that no one had ever quite heard before.

By the early 60s, she was traveling the world singing folk songs and concert halls and coffee houses like the gas-like cafe alongside Bob Dylan, Leonard

Cohen, and Joanie Mitchell. She did all this by the age of 25. From there, her career has taken many shapes, with music always at the center.

She wrote love songs, protest songs, spiritual songs, a combination of which got her blacklisted by President's

Nixon and Johnson.

She won an Academy Award in 1982 for co-writing the song Up Where we belong from the film an officer and a gentleman

Making her the first indigenous person to win an Oscar

She had a five-year run as a cast member on Sesame Street,

where she was the first person to breastfeed a child

on national television.

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