Technology Quote by Buffy Sainte-Marie

A lot is smuggled into this matter-of-fact bit of tech talk: autonomy, access, and the quiet thrill of bypassing the old gatekeepers. Buffy Sainte-Marie isn’t marveling at gadgets for their own sake. She’s describing a workflow that collapses distance and permission into a few pragmatic steps: make the work, move the file, get it printed. The line’s power comes from how casually it treats what used to be a logistical and cultural ordeal - especially for an Indigenous artist whose career unfolded alongside industries that routinely controlled distribution, credit, and mobility.

The detail choice is the tell. “Hand it to the printer” evokes a tactile, almost old-school exchange; “modem the painting… over the phone lines” signals early digital optimism, when the internet still felt like a hack for the determined rather than a walled garden owned by platforms. Sainte-Marie positions herself in Hawaii, geographically distant from mainland art and media hubs, and then immediately erases that disadvantage with infrastructure. The subtext: you can live where you live, be who you are, and still deliver professional-grade work on your terms.

There’s also an understated defiance in the sentence structure: no mysticism about creativity, no romantic suffering. Just production, transfer, output. Coming from someone known for crossing music, activism, and media, it reads like a manifesto disguised as tech support - a claim that modern tools can be instruments of sovereignty, not just convenience.