Buffy Sainte-Marie

I was an infant when I was living in Canada, but when I was adopted, I was a baby, so I grew up in Maine and Massachusetts, and I returned to Saskatchewan as - in my late teens.

Instead of kids just hearing about beads and baskets and fringe, and about what 'was' and 'were,' we present Native American culture as a living contemporary culture.

I've always had that attitude about my career: it's something that I do, but it's not my whole life. I have a real life, a personal life: I've got a lot of chickens, I've got a horse, I've got a kitty-cat, I've got a lot of goats, I've got animals all over the place.

Digital art software has empowered both the painterly side of photographers, and the photographer side of painters.

I think that most Americans feel that the Indians lost because of fair fights and superior odds and superior weaponry. That's because that's the only side of the story that's been told.

I see myself as having three families: my birth family, the family that raised me, and my Cree family, who I was reunited with in my late teens, so I consider myself to be lucky.

The input of Idle No More has been a lightning rod for people who were already thinking this way. We are reaching clarities on bigger issues like fracking and GMOs and climate change.

I've had a different kind of career on the periphery of show business. I've never been on any kind of corporate timetable whereby every six months I have to pop out a record like a pulping mill. I've called my own shots. When I get tired, I take time off.

The time I save setting up and cleaning up probably balances out by the time I spend on output.

I put all my time into Indian rights, and I think this is something I know something about, and I think that my time is best spent insofar as my political views are concerned.

Another time factor is output: proofing and printing. That is, getting your work out of the computer and onto paper and having it satisfy you. It can be time consuming and expensive.

I was adopted without the benefit of papers. They used to hide adoption in the forties; I don't know why. Perhaps it was shameful. I could have been kidnapped - there are all kinds of crazy things that people have done - but I got over dealing with that a long time ago.