PHOTO ESSAY

Rebel Yells

A protest music mixtape

By Matthew McKinnon

August 12, 2005

Now That the Buffalo’s Gone, Buffy Sainte-Marie

(It’s My Way!, 1964)

“This song was on my first album and I’d have thought it would be obsolete by now. But governments are still breaking promises and stealing indigenous lands, and I still believe that informed people can help make things better,” reads a message from Sainte-Marie on her website, where I found the lyrics to Gone, a caustic lament against mistreatment of North America’s aboriginal people. “Oh, it’s all in the past, you can say / But it’s still going on here today / The governments now want the Navaho land / That of the Inuit and the Cheyenne,” the Saskatchewan-born Sainte-Marie, a Cree Indian, sang in her tell-tale vibrato. Hers was — and is — a voice for the voiceless.

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