Mouthbows to Cyberskins

A Voice Without Compromise

There is a reason critics have called Buffy Sainte-Marie "our Elvis and our Madonna" in the Native community. She emerged in 1964 with It's My Way!, a debut album that announced a fully-formed original voice with nothing borrowed and nothing softened. She wrote "Universal Soldier" as an anti-war statement before the Vietnam War was even widely debated. She wrote "Until It's Time for You to Go," a love song later recorded by Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, and more than 200 other artists. She did both on the same record.

The site’s name traces her trajectory. In the early 1960s, Buffy picked up the mouthbow — one of humanity’s oldest instruments, a simple hunting bow held to the lips and plucked to produce resonant, haunting tones. She played it on her first album and brought it to stages and living rooms around the world. Decades later, she became one of the earliest recording artists to build a personal website, one of the first to compose music entirely on a synthesizer, and a digital visual artist whose work hangs in galleries and museums.

From Mouthbow to Digital Canvas

The journey from a hunting bow strung with a single string to a computer loaded with digital painting tools is long, but it is coherent — both are about making something beautiful from unconventional materials. Making music on a weapon. Making art from code. Always transforming.