Background:

Academy Award-winning musician and artist, Buffy Sainte-Marie has been a tireless crusader for Indigenous truths and stories. Buffy earned her own degree in Oriental Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts, later received a teaching degree, and eventually a Ph.D in Fine Arts.

As an educator and a knowledge-keeper, she uses her multimedia skills to create accurate, enriching core-subject teaching materials based in Indigenous cultural perspectives, and brings people together to share them in a meaningful way.

In the 1990s, with the help of support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Herb Alpert Foundation and the Global Fund for Children, Buffy Sainte-Marie put a team together under her charitable non-profit corporation, the Nihewan Foundation. They created the Cradleboard Teaching Project. The Cradleboard Teaching Project served children and teachers worldwide for 15 years in the United States and Canada – free, live, and online – connecting Indigenous and non-Indigenous classes and raising test scores in core subjects through the new core curriculum.

The ideas developed through the Cradleboard Teaching Project have since been shared with teacher education departments, colleges and universities across Canada, fulfilling Buffy’s gut instinct to embed and improve education from within; without succumbing to the temptation to build a business, create an endowment, or otherwise divert from Nihewan’s sole mission to help children of all backgrounds through improved education. She continually extends the Nihewan mission into her artistic, educational, and personal life, has never taken a salary, and always kept the foundation operating costs under 15%.

Buffy Sainte-Marie has used Cradleboard Teaching Project methods in working with teacher education departments in several universities, teaching emerging and established teachers how to create their own localized indigenous interactive multimedia curriculum in science and other core subjects.

The dream of the Nihewan Foundation this year is to revitalize and expand the work of the Cradleboard Teaching Project in Canada. Stay tuned.