Buffy Sainte-Marie by Andrea Warner

Author:Andrea Warner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2018-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

GENERATION

IN 1975, SESAME STREET had only been on the air six years, but already it had revolutionized children’s television and was considered a cultural institution. From the beginning, it was a hit. “Sesame Street Dazzles in Television Premiere” read a headline in Variety.39 The show was aimed at preschoolers and had specific goals about reflecting accurate and nonjudgmental depictions of the lives of inner-city kids; it was set in a brownstone tenement and the cast included strong African-American characters Gordon and Susan (who were the cornerstone of the street), and Hispanic characters Maria and Luis (added in 1972). White characters were deliberately in the minority. They also cast everyday kids, not child actors, to play the children of Sesame Street. According to author Michael Davis’s 2008 book, Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street, at the end of its first year, Sesame Street was in the homes of 1.9 million Americans, and a decade later, more than nine million American kids under the age of six watched it daily.40

Sainte-Marie didn’t expect the phone call from Sesame Street’s producers asking her to be a typical one-shot guest on the show, and in fact, she almost said no. She was busy with other ventures and she didn’t really want to go all the way to New York just to count to ten like everyone else who made a guest appearance. But before she hung up she asked a question. “I said, have you ever done any Native American programming?” she recalls. They hadn’t, but they called her back with a new offer to include her as a writer and contributor and appear as a semi-regular cast member. She knew it would be a good opportunity to reach millions of young children and their parents with the same message she had been bringing to her concert audiences for years: “Indians exist.”

Among Sainte-Marie’s first Sesame Street appearances was a location shoot in Taos, New Mexico, for a full week of shows. Producers even temporarily changed the theme song to begin with, “Sunny day, coming to Santa Fe,” and end with, “We’re a long, long, long, long, long, long way from Sesame Street.” Sainte-Marie takes Big Bird and his human friend Maria to visit Taos Pueblo, an Indigenous community in New Mexico. Sainte-Marie’s performance is quite natural, and her rapport with future lifelong friend Sonia Manzano, who played Maria, was immediate. Through a handful of scenes, Sainte-Marie manages to convey some vital information about Indigenous people, including that while she’s Cree from Canada, there are hundreds of different tribes and nations with their own languages and customs and culture, and that she’s a guest there, too. She also sings a few songs and plays the mouth bow, and they find out about the children’s way of life in the pueblo.

Accurate representations of Indigenous life in pop culture were painfully rare in 1975. “It’s very hard to create a presence when all of the seats are already filled by the same old people who’ve been doing it the same way forever,” Sainte-Marie says.

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