Buffy Sainte-Marie on Tar Sands: ‘You’ve Got to Take This Seriously’

Image source: twitter.com/BuffySteMarie'If you really want to see something historic in your life, go to Fort McMurray and just bear witness to what they're doing,' says legendary musician-activist Sainte-Marie.
Image source: twitter.com/BuffySteMarie
‘If you really want to see something historic in your life, go to Fort McMurray and just bear witness to what they’re doing,’ says legendary musician-activist Sainte-Marie.

 

David P. Ball, ICTMN

 

For decades, Buffy Sainte-Marie has been an artistic trailblazer. The Sixties folk explosion saw the Canadian-born Cree songwriter confront the colonial status quo with hit songs like “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” as well as the anti-war anthem “Universal Soldier.” Sainte-Marie, who is currently based in Hawaii, is gearing up to record her first album of new material since 2008 (more on that later), and took a few minutes to share her thoughts on a number of topics with ICTMN

We’ve seen your Tweets (@BuffySteMarie) about the oil sands, or tar sands as they’re sometimes called — what’s your take on the situation?

Almost a year ago I went to Fort McMurray (Alberta) and I was just devastated with what’s going on there. Just devastated. I just told everybody I could: “You’ve got to take this seriously.” Even since I was there, other people have really stepped forward in their own ways, Neil Young in particular. He’s caught a lot of criticism because he didn’t involve me, Susan Aglukark or other Native people. Neil came to the induction ceremony in Nashville, at the Musicians Hall of Fame, and I told him I’d seen some of the criticism and not to listen to it at all! Because it’s so important, it has to be everybody doing whatever they can, whenever they can, and being effective at whatever level they can be. You reach people your way, I do it my way and Neil does it his way. But people have to see it.

RELATED: Neil Young: Blood of First Nations People Is on Canada’s Hands

It’s really worth a trip to Fort McMurray just to see it with your own eyes. If you really want to see something historic in your life, go to Fort McMurray and just bear witness to what they’re doing. It’s never going to return, and this is the future of the planet if the present people are allowed to stay in charge. We are allowing them to stay in charge. We are allowing it. That’s why we have wars. We have to be really vigilant and supportive of one another, because it has to stop. There’s no turning back.

Neil Young toured with the First Nation that’s experiencing high cancer rates from the tar sands. And yet he also caught criticism when people said, “Oh, he’s just an outsider, he lives in California — what right does he have to criticize this?”

(Laughs). Because it’s not only about Canada, that’s why! Good for Neil for stepping up. Everybody should be stepping up at whatever their most effective level is. It’s not just about Native people and it’s not just about Canada. Just the weather changes are indicative: people just gotta wake up.

Have the issues changed over time, or is it still the same root issues as in your songs “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” or “Universal Soldier”?

The root issue is always the same. It’s about corporate greed in charge of all of our energy. That’s the root issue. But in the 1500s it was gold and silver in Central America, and then coal, oil, and now uranium. I have a song that’s going to be on the album I’m recording now called “The Uranium War.” It has a line:

Coal and oil and hey, now uranium
Keep the Indians under your thumb
Pray like hell when your bad times come
Get ’em up, rip ’em up, strip ’em up
Get ’em with a gun.

So the violence that occurs, and has been occurring against Indigenous People in the world because of resources has now become obvious to the non-indigenous people too. There are now more people understanding how devastating the misuse of resources not only can be, but just plain is.

Let’s talk about the Longest Walk. Richie Havens passed on last year, and you were a long supporter of the Longest Walk and affirming treaty rights. Could you offer some thoughts on him, his passing and his legacy?

He and I kind of emerged around the same time — the summer of 1963-4. We would see each other over the years. He came and visited me in Hawaii a few times. We were good friends. He was such an incredible interpreter of other people’s songs, and such a good guy. Pete Seeger too — he just did so much for the world through music, in ways both subtle and big. You know, heaven must be a great place, because there’s a lot of people going there!

Pete Seeger with Buffy Sainte-Marie. Source: twitter.com/buffystemarie
Pete Seeger with Buffy Sainte-Marie. Source: twitter.com/buffystemarie

 

You were with Pete Seeger at Clearwater Fest last summer. The photos were just beautiful, you guys having a lovely hug.

He was just really, really special, huh?

Do you ever feel nostalgic for that era, when you all emerged almost at once? It must have been such a different energy because it was also a social movement as well as being about music.

It was, but I’ve been waiting for it to come back. And I think it has. For me, the Internet is like the Sixties. It used to be, in the Sixties, all kinds of music was available to you, but it was kept away. You had to go with this label and that genre. It really became a very narrow-minded corporate world. They’d sign 90 artists and shelve 90 others. It used to be so unfair. But now you can hear all kinds of music, and everybody can get played, publish a song, or share things on the Internet. It’s such a wonderful time that we’re living in. You shouldn’t discount it or think that the Sixties were better. The Sixties were about a true student movement. And now there’s another true populist movement, so let’s do what we can, while we can.

To learn more about Buffy Sainte-Marie, visit her official site BuffySainte-Marie.com.

 

Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/03/19/buffy-sainte-marie-tar-sands-youve-got-take-seriously-154085?page=0%2C1

‘Fort McMurray is a wasteland’: Neil Young slams oil patch, Keystone plans

 

Video: Neil Young says Fort McMurray looks like ‘Hiroshima’

 

Paul Koring and Kelly Cryderman

WASHINGTON/CALGARY — The Globe and Mail

Sep. 10 2013

 

Canadian rocker Neil Young has waded into the bitter debate over Alberta’s vast oil sands and the controversial Keystone XL pipeline planned to funnel one million barrels a day of Canadian crude to huge refineries in Texas and Louisiana.

Mr. Young said in a news conference on Monday that oil sands extraction was killing native peoples, igniting a new firestorm in the ongoing battle between proponents who want the massive reserves extracted and an array of opponents who argue that burning the carbon-heavy crude will seriously exacerbate global warming that threatens the planet.

Neil Young arrives for the film "Neil Young Journeys" at the Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto on Sept. 12, 2011.(Nathan Denette/THE CANADIAN PRESS)
Neil Young arrives for the film “Neil Young Journeys” at the Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto on Sept. 12, 2011.
(Nathan Denette/THE CANADIAN PRESS)

“The fact is, Fort McMurray looks like Hiroshima,” Mr. Young said in Washington. “Fort McMurray is a wasteland. The Indians up there and the native peoples are dying.”

Keystone opponents were quick to cheer Mr. Young’s blunt intervention.

Sierra Club spokesman Eddie Scher said: “Neil Young has been expressing and exposing hard truths his whole career,” adding: “Looks like he’s at it again.”

Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver – who was in Washington himself on the same day for a meeting with U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, took a different view.

“I am a big fan of Neil Young’s music,” Mr. Oliver told the Globe. “But on this matter we disagree because Keystone XL will displace heavy oil from Venezuela which has the same or higher greenhouse gas emissions, with a stable and secure source of Canadian oil.”

The singer is among a growing number of well-known activists speaking out against Keystone XL “Neil Young is speaking for all of us fighting to stop the Keystone XL,” said Jane Kleeb, Executive Director of Bold Nebraska, a coalition of landowners and others opposed to the $5.3-billion Keystone XL pipeline. “When you see the pollution already caused by the reckless expansion of tar sands, you only have one choice and that is to act.”

Mr. Young, one of Canada’s best-known singer-songwriters since the 1960s, told a conference in Washington Monday that he recently travelled to Alberta, where “much of the oil comes from, much of the oil that we’re using here, which they call ethical oil because it’s not from Saudi Arabia or some country that may be at war with us.”

As for Keystone, Mr. Young lampooned claims that it would create lots of jobs.

“Yeah it’s going to put a lot of people to work, I’ve heard that, and I’ve seen a lot of people that would dig a hole that’s so deep that they couldn’t get out of it, and that’s a job too, and I think that’s the jobs that we are talking about there with the Keystone pipeline,” he said.

He spoke at the U.S. National Farmers Union conference in Washington, intended to support alternative fuels, such as ethanol, which he did at length, slamming Big Oil and talking about his own LincVolt, an old Continental that runs on ethanol and electricity.

Young said he drove the 1959 Lincoln, which runs on ethanol and electricity, to Fort McMurray while traversing the continent from his California home to Washington over the last two and half weeks.

At the same time, Canada’s Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver was making the latest in a long series of lobbying visits by ministers and premiers intended to sway President Barack Obama to approve the long-delayed pipeline.

Ms. Kleeb wasn’t impressed. “Prime Minister Harper can write all the memos he wants, Joe Oliver can say anything but the reality is people are dying and the alliance between cowboys and Indians is stronger than any K Street lobbyists Canada hires.”

All Risk, No Rewards, another group opposed to Keystone XL also echoed Mr. Young’s comments.

“Canada’s First Nations know all too well the risks of Keystone XL and the risks of expanding the tar sands,” said Rachel Wolf, a spokeswoman for the group. Ranchers in Nebraska and First Nations peoples in Canada have more in common than one might think: they’re ‘Ordinary People’ who share a common goal to protect their land and protect their water, and they both know that these tar sands expansion projects are all risk and no reward.”

Mr. Young described his recent visit graphically. “The fuel’s all over – the fumes everywhere – you can smell it when you get to town. The closest place to Fort McMurray that is doing the tar sands work is 25 or 30 miles out of town and you can taste it when you get to Fort McMurray. People are sick. People are dying of cancer because of this. All the First Nations people up there are threatened by this.”

Mr. Young’s comments don’t sit well with Fort McMurray’s mayor, who called them “blatantly false.”

Melissa Blake, mayor of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, which includes Fort McMurray, said she has no problem with people having environmental interests at heart.

But she said Fort McMurray is totally different from Mr. Young’s characterization. With his power in the music industry, she’s disappointed “there wasn’t more rationality to it.”

“When people say it’s a wasteland, it really and truly isn’t,” Ms. Blake said. “When it comes to the community of Fort McMurray, you’re overwhelmed frankly by the beauty of it. You’ve got an incredible boreal environment that’s all around you. You proceed further north into the oil sands and inevitably, there’s mining operations that will draw your attention because they take up large chunks of land.”

The mayor said she always invites outsiders to the region to see the landscape, and to see oil sands companies’ reclamation efforts.

Danielle Droitsch, director of the National Resources Defense Council, said “Seeing tar sands development up close is shocking” adding “these are massive operations and industry hopes to triple its production over the next 20 years.”

Blocking Keystone XL will thwart expansion of oil sands production, according to the NRDC, but Mr. Oliver says Canada will just export its reserves elsewhere.

With files from Steven Chase and The Canadian Press