Native American Sayings Quote by Buffy Sainte-Marie

“Beads and baskets and fringe” lands like a museum diorama: tidy, decorative, safely past tense. Buffy Sainte-Marie is calling out a familiar North American script where Indigenous life gets flattened into craft motifs and textbook verbs, a culture rendered as artifact. Her most biting move is grammatical. “What ‘was’ and ‘were’” isn’t just about boring pedagogy; it’s an indictment of how institutions teach Native people as already gone, as if colonialism’s preferred ending has quietly been accepted as fact.

The intent is corrective, but it’s also confrontational: stop feeding kids a version of Indigeneity that’s consumable and dead. Sainte-Marie, an artist and activist who spent decades pushing against media erasure and bureaucratic indifference, understands that representation isn’t neutral. When schools and pop culture emphasize regalia without politics, tradition without survival, they’re not “celebrating diversity” so much as quarantining it.

Her phrase “living contemporary culture” does two jobs at once. It insists on presence - Native communities are here - and it demands complexity: modernity, adaptation, contradiction, urban life, new art forms, new fights. The subtext is that children are being trained into a colonial worldview through curriculum: admire the aesthetics, ignore the people. Sainte-Marie’s alternative isn’t simply adding new facts; it’s changing the tense, the frame, and the moral burden. Teach Native culture as now, and you’re forced to deal with sovereignty, land, and the ongoing consequences of history - not just the pretty parts that fit on a bulletin board.