As a teenager I started painting and playing guitar.

On 13 June 2008 Buffy Sainte-Marie received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Carleton University in Ottawa Canada an honorary Doctor of Music from The University of Western Ontario on June 10 2009 in London Ontario and an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the Ontario College of Art & Design on June 4 2010 in Toronto Ontario Canada. She became an active friend of the Bahá'í Faith by the mid-1970s when Buffy Sainte-Marie is said to have appeared in the 1973 Third National Baha’i Youth Conference at the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds Oklahoma City Oklahoma and has continued to appear at concerts conferences and conventions of that religion since then. In September 2008 Sainte-Marie made a comeback onto the music scene in Canada with the release of her latest studio album Running For The Drum.

Throughout her career in all of these areas her work has focused on issues of Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Buffy Sainte-Marie OC (born February 20 1941) is a Canadian-American Cree singer-songwriter musician composer visual artist educator pacifist and social activist.