Buffy Sainte Marie is another magical being who doesn’t show her witchiness through occult study, cauldrons, crystals or tarot cards, but rather, through a devotion to change, a reverence for nature, a recognition of the power of ceremony. The nerve to go her own way. She sang, “Magic is Alive” and claims that the core of her belief system is Creativity. So by me, and for this circle, this coven of stories and knowledge and healing, Buffy Sainte Marie is undoubtedly holy. A Medicine Woman, with Medicine Songs.
TRANSCRIPT BELOW
The book I relied on for this episode is Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography by Andrea Warner
Some of the songs I mentioned in the episode:
TRANSCRIPT
Buffy Sainte Marie - This Is My Path. Discover Your Own.
Season 4 of the Missing Wicthes Podcast is lovingly sponsored by our Patreon Patrons (thank you) and Foxglove Pharm. Go to foxglovepharm.com and use offer code MISSINGWITCHES for 13% off your order.
Happy Thanksgiving to our Canadian listeners. In the USA, it’s fucking Columbus Day. So I thought today would be a great time to tell the story of a medicine woman, with medicine songs. As I’m recording this, a Mi'kmaw community in Nova Scotia is battling for their right to trap and sell lobster. As Trina Roache from APTN (the aboriginal people’s television network) said, “This is not just a story about lobster. This is a story about how Canada handles aboriginal treaty rights.”
Today’s story is not just a story about a singer. This is a story about persistence, creativity, indigeneity and ingenuity. This is the story of Buffy Sainte Marie.
Most of our Missing Witches episodes are inspired by words - books, articles, poems, spells, but the idea for today’s offering came from my record collection. We say Words are Spells a lot around here, but so too are notes, tones, music, vibrations, vibrato. Buffy Sainte Marie is another magical being who doesn’t show her witchiness through occult study, cauldrons, crystals or tarot cards, but rather, through a devotion to change, a reverence for nature, a recognition of the power of ceremony. The nerve to go her own way. She sang, “Magic is Alive” and claims that the core of her belief system is Creativity. So by me, and for this circle, this coven of stories and knowledge and healing, Buffy Sainte Marie is undoubtedly holy. A Medicine Woman, with Medicine Songs.
We’ll go looking for Buffy in the places I met her - old, treasured episodes of Sesame street and of course her recordings, music and lyrics, where my emotions dwell, but our main source of information today will be Andrea Warner’s book: Buffy Sainte Marie The Authorized Biography. Buffy worked closely with Andrea Warner and much of the book is Buffy telling her own story in her own words. This is one of those books where I ended up bookmarking and highlighting every page, whole chapters where I had to pause and ask myself, like, how am I going to do this? How can I choose which bits to quote and share with my Coven? So I definitely encourage you to pick up a copy of this book for yourself, discover your own path through it, and decide for yourself what’s important. I think that’s what Buffy would want you to do. Buffy Sainte Marie The Authorized Biography by Andrea Warner.
The Missing Witches project is, at its heart, a search for Role Models. Role Models who believe or believed in something beyond the prescribed, acceptable, the normal. The known. Risa and I have always copped to our lack of objectivity, many of our scripts are more love letter than essay. So lemme just say, I don’t know Buffy personally, but based on my research, she might be the sweetest person in the world. And sweet is great, but the people I admire the most are those who’s sweetness is equal to their salt, people who’s ferocity is in perfect balance with their compassion, who know when to calm, and when to storm. Buffy is such a person. Her activism is relentless. Her music is incendiary. Her lyrics are provocative. Her energy for Change seems limitless. But there is a kindness and a joy that pour out of her glowing smile, something comforting and playful about the tone of her voice - even when her tears are visible, when her sadness and rage are palpable, amid her cries for justice, we can sense that sympathy is her guide. She radiates goodness...and magic...and Love.
She’s also responsible, in part, for the success of another of my all time favourite magical music goddesses, Joni Micthell. Buffy was impressed with Joni’s originality so she performed Joni’s songs and carried Joni’s tape around, playing it for anyone who would listen. She eventually caught the ear of Elliot Roberts who would become Joni’s manager. See... here’s the thing, my Witches, when a door opens for you, you can walk through and let it slam closed behind you, or you can pause...briefly… and hold it open for someone else - like Harriet Tubman, in some small way. Buffy is a great holder of doors.
There’s no official record of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s birth. We know she was born in Saskatchewan. We know she is Cree.
Buffy was likely born in 1941 so she technically pre-dated the epidemic of cultural annihilation known as, in what I believe to be much too cute sounding of a term, The Sixties Scoop. There’s no other way to say this. The Canadian Government kidnapped indigenous children and adopted or fostered them out to primarily white middle-class families. Between the1950s that’s NINETEEN fifties and the 1980s - that’s NINETEEN eighties - I emphasise so we understand that this could have been us, or our parents, and for some of you listening, it may have been you, or your parents. I emphasise so we understand that this is not Columbus Day colonial history like ‘people were so crazy 400 years ago, we’ve evolved since then’. No. Between the 1950s and 1980s, it is estimated that at least 20,000 indigenous children were taken from their families.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixties_Scoop We know from Buffy’s story and many others, however, that this scooping began long before the 50s and continued long after the 80s. Starting in the 1800s, residential schools took indigenous children from their families and placed them in religious indoctrination institutions. In total, an estimated 150,000 First Nation, Inuit, and Métis children attended residential schools. The stories of rampant abuse are devastating. The last residential school in Canada closed in 1996.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/residential-schools
Buffy was probably born in 1941. As Andrea Warner writes: to be born Cree in the 1940s in Canada was to be a person who was not always counted, at least not in a formal and legal fashion (7). Buffy was taken from her home in Saskatchewan, Canada and adopted into a family TWO THOUSAND MILES AWAY in Massachusetts, USA. As an aside, BOTH Saskatchewan and Massachusetts are Algonquian words….. That fucking white supremecist, colonial mentalty - keeping indigenous words as they please, like Haida tattoos, plastic totem poles for their colonized lands, then systematically destroying the keepers of these images, lands and languages. Keeping the words but stripping the meaning. Keeping the words but stripping the land. Keeping the names and killing the namers. The fucking caucasity required to steal children from their homes and claim you’re doing them a favour, calling the stolen childrens’ parents ‘savages.’ We’re still doing this. The government will give foster parents more money to care for a child than they will give that child’s parents to care for the child at home.
So as a baby, Buffy was shipped off to become a Sainte-Marie in whose family home she would, at least, discover a piano and the music within her. At three years old she would patiently observe the piano lessons of her older brother, afterward running to the keys to recreate the lesson by ear and compose by instinct. Andrea Warner wrote: Every note she’s ever played, arranged, composed or produced is by ear and memory, gut and feel (17).
Please carry this as a chant, dear witches: Ear and Memory, Gut and Feel. What do you sense? What wisdom lurks within? What does your inner witch warrior advise? What emotions are arising? Ear and memory, gut and feel. Ear and memory, gut and feel.
Buffy grew up in what she now laughingly calls Javex USA (19). Bleach white. And in keeping with that WASPy stereotype of stuffy avoidance, Buffy never really got a solid answer on who she was or where she came from. She was tan, brown-eyed, hair black as a new moon midnight, and she stood out in Javex USA. She was variously told that she was abandoned, adopted, or that Mrs Sainte Marie was part Mi'kmaq and her biological mother, or that maybe Mr Sainte-Marie wasn’t Buffy’s father wink wink, and she never knew exactly what to believe.
Now, a warning, hold steady your heart lest it be shattered: Buffy also grew up being physically and then sexually abused by her older brother. And then by an adult man, a friend of the family. She took refuge in music and nature.
I don’t like to quantify trauma, but I think it’s safe to say that my childhood was a lot easier than Buffy’s. Still, when I was a kid and needed an escape I’d climb trees and sit in the embrace of their limbs for hours. Or I would put on a record and disappear, sinking into the tones like warm water. As I aged these things merged - that tree limb became a guitar neck and I could clutch wood, sing and play myself into another world. Music and Nature. When I interviewed Big Sissy Athena Homes, they said the same thing. That music and nature had saved them. How many of us have been saved by Music and Nature? Music and Nature, we thank you.
As with a lot of us who are constantly struggling to figure out, in one way or another, at any given moment, what the fuck is going on here, Buffy was drawn to philosophy. Warner wrote:
************
Buffy, at heart, is a creator. Not just a thinker, philosopher, but a maker, a doer! In an interview with the CBC she reaffirmed:
"To me there's a spirituality to everything. If we're made in the image of the Creator, what that means to me is that we're creative. ...the purpose and the sum total of our lives has to do with our creativity."
I think for a lot of us, whether we are artists or bakers or candlestick makers, parents molding future adults, our creativity is, in large part, our spirituality. It’s our ritualized process or praxis that connects us with our ancestors or the great Divine.
Buffy had a unique voice, an ear for music, a creative spirit and a political message, plus it was the 60s, so naturally, she became a folk singer.
Having gained confidence through coffee house gigs and tiny concerts while completing her philosophy and teaching degrees, Buffy made the decision to move to the undisputed hub of mainstream american folk music at the time: Greenwich Village. There she would edge her way into open mic nights, sharing the stage with a young Bob Dylan among others in a basement venue called The Gaslight. When Time magazine called Buffy, “the most intriguing young folk singer to emerge in many a moon” a record deal was inevitable.(53)
In 1964, Buffy released her first album: It’s My Way! And we’ll focus here for a while because Buffy thought this would be her only album, so she felt compelled to get every important message she had in there. Some listeners and music writers compared this to Frank Sinatra’s I did it my way, with the emphasis on the word My, but Buffy explains that her focus is on the word Way. She said, “This is my path. Discover your own. They’re out there. The paths to wonderfulness, to effectiveness, to joy, to living are generated everywhere! Project Your Path Outward From Where You Are Inside Yourself.” This has been one of the major takeaways for me, personally, of the Missing Witches Project. It has been a study of paths. There are so many ways to make magic. There are so many paths. An infinite variety, none lesser or greater. And each one stands in perfect validity, without judging itself against the paths of others. The album It’s My Way contains iconic, emotion-stirring songs like Universal Soldier and Cod’ine.
The debut song on her debut album was called, Now That the Buffalo's Gone, and as I read you some of the lyrics, I want you to imagine the strength of character required for Buffy to insist that this be her introduction to the world at large.
Can you remember the times
That you have held your head high
And told all your friends of your Indian claim?
Proud good lady and proud good man
Some great great grandfather from Indian blood came
And you feel in your heart for these ones
Oh, it's written in books and in song
That we've been mistreated and wronged
Well over and over I hear those same words
From you good lady and you good man
Well listen to me if you care where we stand
And you feel you're a part of these ones
When a war between nations is lost
The loser we know pays the cost
But even when Germany fell to your hands
Consider dear lady, consider dear man
You left them their pride and you left them their land
And what have you done to these ones
Has a change come about my dear man
Or are you still taking our lands?
A treaty forever your senators sign
They do dear lady, they do dear man
And the treaties are broken again and again
And what will you do for these ones
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
It's here and it's now you can help us dear man
Now that the buffalo's gone
Buffy wrote The Universal Soldier as news of America's war with Vietnam began to spread.
He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an atheist, a Jain,
a Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew
and he knows he shouldn't kill
and he knows he always will
kill you for me my friend and me for you
His orders come from far away no more
They come from him, and you, and me
and brothers can't you see
this is not the way we put an end to war
The more famous folk singer Donovan covered the song and many assumed he had written it. Universal Soldier was also covered by The Highwaymen who, in a case of cocktail napkin contract fuckery that the music industry is known for, ended up owning the publishing rights to the song.
According to Andrea Warner it took Buffy ten years and 25 grand to buy back the rights to her song; some websites still show Donovan as the songwriter. So here is Buffy trying to take back something that was stolen from her by white men and I can’t help but tie this real quick to the notion of LANDBACK. So, what does “Land Back” mean? Let’s ask Cree community organizer Ronald Gamblin who wrote: While these words seem straight forward enough, this phrase encompasses a complicated and intergenerational web of ideas/movements. When I hear Indigenous youth and land protectors chant “Land Back!” at a rally, I know it can mean the literal restoration of land ownership. When grandmothers and knowledge keepers say it, I tend to think it means more the stewardship and protection of mother earth. When Indigenous political leaders say it, it often means comprehensive land claims and self-governing agreements. No matter what meaning is attached, we as Indigenous nations have an urge to reconnect with our land in meaningful ways.”
If, as a non-indigenous person this idea scares that deep-seated colonial part of you, let me lovingly assure you that no one is coming for your granddaddy’s farm. Almost 90% of Canada is Crown Land. “Crown land is the term used to describe land owned by the federal or provincial governments. Authority for control of these public lands rests with the Crown, hence their name. Less than 11% of Canada's land is in private hands; 41% is federal crown land and [an additional] 48% is provincial crown land.” https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/crown-land
It’s My Way - Track 5, Cod’ine, is a go-to cover for me when I’m feeling desolate. I grab my guitar and I sing Cod’ine at top volume. My belly is cravin, I got an achin in my head, I feel like I’m dyin and I wish I was dead… Sometimes I hang on lines and repeat them over and over and over… And I’ll reel and I’ll fall and I’ll rise…. The song is about addiction and withdrawal and comes from Buffy’s own experience. As she tells it, she went to a doctor for a bronchial infection and he gave her what he told her was a vitamin B12 shot, some pills and a prescription for more pills, which he said were antibiotics. For a few weeks, she received check-ups and more shots. Then, luckily, she went on a trip. She started feeling sick so she went to a pharmacy on the road to refill her prescription. The pharmacist told her she wasn’t sick, she was going through withdrawal. Horrified, Buffy spent the next several days riding out the hell of being junk sick. Writing Cod’ine helped her process but the experience still haunted her - years later she heard a story and it all made sense. That same doctor had been sent to jail for turning young, vulnerable women into prostitutes by deviously and intentionally addicting them to drugs. Buffy may have escaped this doctor’s dastardly plan, but, encountering violence all her life, she did not escape the statistics. She did, however, survive.
The missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) epidemic has been described as a Canadian national crisis[5][6][7] and a Canadian genocide.[8][9][10][11][12] In 2016, The Government of Canada established the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.[14] According to the April 22, 2016 background of the inquiry, between the years 1980 and 2012, Indigenous women and girls represented 16% of all female homicides in Canada, while constituting only 4% of the female population in Canada.[15] A 2011 Statistics Canada report estimated that between 1997 and 2000, the rate of homicides for Aboriginal women and girls was almost seven times higher than that for other females.[16] Compared to non-Indigenous women and girls, they were also "disproportionately affected by all forms of violence".[15] They are also significantly over-represented among female Canadian homicide victims,[17] and are far more likely than other women to go missing.[18]
In the United States, Native American women are more than twice as likely to experience violence than any other demographic. One in three Native women is sexually assaulted during her life, and 67% of these assaults are perpetrated by non-Natives.[19][20][21][22][23][a]
The 2014 report "Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women: A National Operational Overview" found that more than 1,000 Indigenous women were murdered over a span of thirty years. While homicides for non-Indigenous women declined between 1980 and 2015, the number of Indigenous women who were victims of homicide increased from 9% of all female homicide victims in 1980 to 24% in 2015.[12]:55[32]:24 From 2001 to 2015, the homicide rate for Indigenous women in Canada was almost six times as high as the homicide rate for non-Indigenous women, representing "4.82 per 100,000 population versus 0.82 per 100,000 population".[32]:22 In Nunavut, Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and in the provinces of Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan, this over-representation of Indigenous women among homicide victims was even higher.[32]:22
But homicide isn’t limited to the streets. Just a few days before this recording, Joyce Echaquan (EhShehQuan) died in a prison hospital while nursing staff demeaned and degraded her with racist misogynist remarks.
Buffy lived through the violence of displacement, was sexually abused as a child, and as an adult, found herself in another violent, abusive relationship, her marriage.
This is the power of systemic and personal abuse. If it can convince a person of miraculous will, like Buffy, even momentarily (she did leave him) that violence is what she deserves, imagine what it does to us mere mortals. Predators are drawn to the vulnerable, so when we as a society make an entire people vulnerable, when indigenous women are marginalized and disenfranchised both socially and economically, we create this epidemic. Emotional vulnerability is powerful. Systemic vulnerability is powerlessness.
In 1966 Buffy sang: My country 'tis of thy people you're dying
Now that the long houses breed superstition
You force us to send our children away
To your schools where they're taught to despise their traditions
Forbid them their languages
Then further say that American history really began
When Columbus set sail out of Europe and stress
That the nations of leeches who conquered this land
Were the biggest, and bravest, and boldest, and best
And yet where in your history books is the tale
Of the genocide basic to this country's birth?
Of the preachers who lied?
How the Bill of Rights failed?
My country 'tis of thy people you're dying
Buffy has put out twenty one records, so I won’t dig into them all here, but I do want to stop in 1969 to drop the needle on Illuminations. This record blew my fucking mind when I first heard it, and indeed, as Andrea Warner points out, “Illuminations is referenced as a precursor to gothic rock, and it also sparked Saint Marie’s friend, punk rock fashion icon Jimmy Webb, to later refer to her as one of the pre-punk punks. Genesis’s Steve Hackett frequently cites Illuminations as a source of inspiration for the band’s sound.”
I’ve always contended that Leonard Cohen was a much better poet than a singer, and his lyrics are almost always better off in the hands of other vocalists, but nowhere is this more clear than in the first track of this record. When Buffy sings:
God is alive
Magic is afoot
God is afoot
Magic is alive
Alive is afoot
Magic never died
Lyrics taken from Leonard’s novel Beautiful Losers, amid her strange synths that sound like condensation dripping in a cave, Buffy’s voice seems supernatural. For those of you who follow us on instagram and saw my series of bread baking stories, you know that this song is soundtrack for some of my most magical tasks. In a world where only a few years earlier, Bob Dylan had shocked the world by playing GASP! an electric guitar, Buffy Sainte-Marie was making ahead of its time, experimental goth punk with computers. IN FACT, her 1992 album Coincidence and Likely Stories holds the distinction of being the first major label record to be made over the internet. Buffy and her producer used the then new technology of midi files and the internet to send bits of music back and forth to create the album. “Starwalker” from her 1976 album Sweet America is considered the first powwow style rock song. Buffy pulls equally from the latest technology to the most ancient traditions to create her art, carving and discovering her own path along the way.
The theme of chosen paths is also evident in Buffy's delightful performance of “Different People, Different Ways” on Sesame Street. Buffy was a recurring character on Sesame Street for five years starting in 1975, and I can’t think of a better symbol for Buffy’s combination of radical ideas and kind-heartedness than the Sesame Street of the 70s and 80s. I’m begging you to take some time to fall down the youtube rabbit hole of searching Buffy Sainte Marie Sesame Street on YouTube. Share it with your children, pets or friends. From the Sesame Street Workshop website: In 1969, Sesame Workshop started with a single bold question: could television be used to educate kids? https://www.sesameworkshop.org/who-we-are/our-history
And so it was that this team, and eventually Buffy too, (Buffy would make appearances on Sesame Street from 1975 to 1981) would attempt to balance the scales of justice in education by providing early childhood education for parents who couldn’t afford it. And not just ABC 123 but real, abstract concepts and the promotion of an emotional maturity that some adults still struggle to grasp.
In one episode, Big Bird has made a drawing but everyone is too busy paying attention to Buffy’s new baby (played by her real son Dakota), so, in an angry jealous huff, Big Bird locks his nest door, posting a sign for his former friends to keep out. Eventually Buffy is allowed to come in and Big Bird describes his contention that Buffy only loves the baby now. Buffy patiently replies, “You can love lots of people, you just love each person in his own way.” She explains in song:
I love him cuz he’s tiny and small,
I love you cuz you’re yellow and tall.
Tiny and small love
Yellow and tall love.
Everyone loves through all their days.
Different people, different ways.
In another episode, Buffy is nursing her infant son. She tells Big Bird, "I’m feeding the baby. See, he’s drinking milk from my breast. Lots of mothers feed their babies this way. Not all mothers, but lots of mothers do.”
Buffy knows that decolonizing and unsettling minds must begin in childhood, not just for a better world but for the children’s own protection.
Andrea Warner wrote:
Now here’s the near inevitable part of almost every episode of the Missing Witches podcast where we invoke the Beloved Witch Ipsita Roy Chakraverti with her quote: every strong woman is a witch and is hunted. So if you’re wondering why you’ve maybe never heard of Buffy before or why she wasn’t invited to perform at Woodstock or why she’s not as famous as those whose careers she’d helped to inspire, like Bob Dylan or Joni, the answer is three fold.
One: Buffy’s just not a fame monster. She tells a great story of going on tour with a then near unknown, Paul Simon. Buffy had already had some success so she was set to headline the shows. Well Paul Simon made a stink and insisted that Buffy should open for him. Buffy only learned about this when she read Paul Simon’s autobiography, many years later. She said laughing: I didn’t even know that was going on at the time. That’s how unimportant it was to me.
Two: Buffy was invited to be on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson - a major pitstop on the road to celebrity - but producers told her she wasn’t allowed to talk about indigenous rights or pacifism… so Buffy refused to appear on the show. But it didn’t end there.
Three: Andrea Warner wrote:
Sainte-Marie knew that her activism may have cost her career in some ways, but she believed it was a consequence of seeking justice. Many other Indigenous activists and friends, after all, had paid a price far worse. But in the late 1980s, a bombshell of a story dropped into Sainte-Marie’s lap. She was being interviewed on the radio when the interviewer apologized for having participated in a campaign to suppress her music in the sixties and seventies, when presidents Lydon Johnson and Richard Nixon were in power.
Sainte-Marie said in a 2008 interview at the National Museum of the American Indian[39] that she had been blacklisted by American radio stations and that she, along with Native Americans and other Indigenous people in the Red Power movements, were put out of business in the 1970s.[40]
In a 1999 interview at Diné College with a staff writer with Indian Country Today, Sainte-Marie said "I found out 10 years later, in the 1980s, that President Lyndon B. Johnson had been writing letters on White House stationery praising radio stations for suppressing my music" and "In the 1970s, not only was the protest movement put out of business, but the Native American movement was attacked."[41]
As a result of this blacklisting led by (among others) Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and Nashville disc jockey Ralph Emery (following the release of I'm Gonna Be a Country Girl Again), Sainte-Marie said "I was put out of business in the United States".[42]
Despite being blacklisted, Buffy continued her music and activism. She once said "I don't like to despair. It's uncomfortable. It kind of hurts to despair. So instead of despairing, I try to do things about it." Andrea Warner quotes Buffy saying something that my Aunt Bea used to say all the time and I, in turn, say ALL the time: it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
Buffy believes that we are always evolving - mutating, ripening, becoming - and that idea is the foundation of her creative and persistent approach to her life and its rippling effect.
She said "As each of us learns and ripens, we affect everything around ourselves.” And this is especially true for Buffy. She’s been remarkably prolific, not just in music but in the daily business of changing the world. Among her hundreds of achievements, in the 90s she spearheaded the Cradleboard Teaching Project which was her attempt to indigenize history, schools and learning environments. Warner writes “If she could indigenize the standard curriculum - both through providing factually correct information about contemporary Indigenous people as well as exploring science, technology, and other core subjects through Indigenous lenses - she could reach new kids all the time and open their eyes to other options.
Buffy currently lives on a farm in Hawaii but, even approaching her 80th year, continues to raise money and awareness, even during quarantines by doing frequent live streams.
Most recently Buffy wrote a song slash book called "Hey Little Rockabye - A Lullaby for Pet Adoption" with part of the proceeds going to Humane Canada, Canada's federation of SPCAs and humane societies.
hey hey little rockabye. You got somebody loves you.
2020 has been a struggle at best. Many of us are stuck in our homes, or trapped in a world we didn’t design. But buffy encourages you to be fruitful. She said: When there’s nothing to do, that bothers some people. But I start doing artsy things. I’ll play with words or I’ll play with music or I’ll start rearranging things in my mind. Re-colorizing things, turning things upside down or inside out. Instead of getting bored, I have fun.
And we at Missing Witches encourage you to do the same - when it seems like there’s nothing to do, look harder, start re-arranging things or just have fun and Play. Discover a path. Discover YOUR path by Ear and memory, gut and feel.
Ear and memory, gut and feel.
We are the universal soldiers and the war continues to be fought. Be you a warrior on the front lines or a spreader of Medicine Songs the resistance and reformation needs your help. Decolonizing or Unsettling is hard work. But don’t worry, you got somebody loves you. And it’s You, and me, and Buffy Sainte Marie. Magic is afoot. Magic is alive. The paths to wonderfulness, to effectiveness, to joy, to living are generated everywhere!
Buffy said, I have two main prayers: one is ‘thanks’ and the other is ‘wow’...(266)
END
This episode of the Missing Witches podcast was written and performed by Amy Torok. Music and editing by Amy Torok. Thanks again to our sponsor Foxglove Pharm, don’t forget to use our listener offer code MISSINGWITCHES for 13% of your order. OR make a contribution to their Wildlife Rescue, Out Of The Woods. Find your witchy wellness at FoxglovePharm (that’s pharm like pharmacy with a ph) dot com. You can also support Missing Witches on Patreon at patreon dot com slash missing witches and COMING SOON, Missing Witches T-shirts on TeePublic. AND PLEASE consider pre-ordering our upcoming book, Missing Witches by Risa Dickens and Amy Torok, published by North Atlantic Books.
