The 1960s singer-songwriter and passionate advocate of indigenous rights, gives us a lesson in eating lobster at her favourite restaurant in Vancouver.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was adopted as a child and the government didn\u2019t give me any information about my family. The idea was to be assimilated and to forget anything else. I don\u2019t even have a birthday: I had one assigned by the courts. Adopted kids don\u2019t have a horoscope.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m told I was about three when I started playing music. That\u2019s when we got a piano. And that was it: I sat down and didn\u2019t get up until I knew how to play. I never played dolls, I never played sport.<\/p>\n
My mum worked as a proofreader and editor for book companies later in her life. She was a stay-at-home mum when I was little. She believed she was part Mi\u2019kmaq [indigenous people] but she wasn\u2019t connected to any knowledgeable sources. My dad was a refrigeration mechanic. We lived in Maine so we had lobster and pheasant. Back then they were considered poor people\u2019s foods and now nobody can afford them. I think it\u2019s kind of funny.<\/p>\n
If it was lobster for dinner, my dad cooked. When I eat them there is nothing left; I can eat two or three real easy. Those little feelers? Gone. Every bit of them. And you have to eat a lobster in order: you eat the mildest part first; the strongest part is the insides, which people call the tomalley. It\u2019s full of toxic stuff so restaurants don\u2019t serve it these days. Just the thought of it is making me hungry. I could do a job on it with nutcrackers and a fork.<\/p>\n
Food at home was nice because it was so simple. There would be corn on the cob and strawberries. My mother was a brilliant baker. I\u2019ve still never tasted as delicate a flaky pie crust as she would make. She was an artist with taste. She didn\u2019t fuss with table settings and things like that but the food was always delicious. My dad\u2019s family was second-generation Italian so I grew up around those kinds of flavours too. It was very lush but nobody knew how rare or expensive that lushness would become.<\/p>\n
I was totally na\u00efve when I went to Greenwich Village and was starting out in music. I had just graduated with a degree in oriental philosophy and a minor in education, so I thought I was on the way to India. When I went into Vanguard Records they said, \u2018We want to sign you, who\u2019s your lawyer?\u2019 I said, \u2018I don\u2019t have one.\u2019 They said, \u2018That\u2019s OK, you can use ours.\u2019 So I signed up for a seven-year contract. It was a clear conflict of interest. I wasn\u2019t raised in a business family and had never met a businessman. Most indigenous people had never met a lawyer or businessman; everybody else was knowledgeable but us.<\/p>\n
But I survived \u2013 and made some real mistakes. I don\u2019t drink, my family didn\u2019t drink and I don\u2019t associate drinking with fun because I\u2019ve never been around it. I\u2019d be in Paris in the 1960s and they\u2019d be having a big reception; you know, very wealthy and accomplished people providing a reception for me because I was the hot thing of the week. And somebody would offer me some wine and I\u2019d say, \u2018No, I don\u2019t drink.\u2019 You don\u2019t do that but I didn\u2019t know.<\/p>\n
There is no indigenous music industry or film industry. There are great artists and people but it just isn\u2019t together like the white, black or Latino music industries. We\u2019re still in a position of being tokenised. There are hundreds of thousands of people involved in indigenous music and we still don\u2019t even know where the door is. Canada\u2019s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, on which I served as a special witness into abuses by the church and the institutions against indigenous children, has gone a long way to righting the wrongs of the past. Not entirely but we\u2019re still working on it.<\/p>\n
The good news about the bad news is that more people know about it. That\u2019s a very big thing. But it doesn\u2019t satisfy everybody because they are always wanting perfection. We\u2019re getting there little by little. It doesn\u2019t have to be a fight. Some people are real fighters and God bless them, but I\u2019m not going to claim that fame. I try to do it in a different way.<\/p>\n
Profile:
The Canadian-American singer-songwriter was born on the Piapot Cree First Nation reserve in the Qu\u2019Appelle Valley of Saskatchewan in 1941; she was adopted as a baby and relocated to Maine. She found success with \u201cUniversal Soldier\u201d, her protest song about an individual\u2019s responsibility for war on her 1964 debut album It\u2019s My Way! She wrote the melody for the 1982 hit \u201cUp Where We Belong\u201d, from the film An Officer and a Gentleman; it won her an Oscar, making her the only indigenous Canadian artist to secure one. Having been awarded the Order of Canada for her contribution to music and indigenous rights, her win at the 2015 Polaris Music prize \u2013 Canada\u2019s best-regarded annual music award \u2013 for album Power in the Blood has brought her new admirers. She has lived in Hawaii since the mid-1960s.<\/p>\n
Venue: To eat: Main course To drink
The Teahouse in Stanley Park has been a Vancouver institution for more than 40 years. It was originally a mess hall during the Second World War and a summer teahouse in the 1950s but owner Brent Davies revamped the property as a restaurant in 1978. Perched on Ferguson Point by the water in Stanley Park, it boasts unparalleled views of the British Columbia coastline \u2013 a landscape that has woven its way through Sainte-Marie\u2019s music and activism.
7501 Stanley Park
drivevancouverdine.com\/teahouse<\/a><\/p>\n
Starter
Mussels in spicy tomato broth<\/p>\n
Mushroom ravioli with garden herbs<\/p>\n
Mint tea<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 1960s singer-songwriter and passionate advocate of indigenous rights, gives us a lesson in eating lobster at her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":816156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194298],"tags":[286293,9301,286294,49,48,286295,71276,178408,286296,115411,286297,162940,48128,80038,135155,47864,286298,286299,286300,55],"class_list":["post-816155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-vancouver","tag-1960s-music","tag-adoption","tag-buffy-sainte-marie","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-canadian-american-singer","tag-folk-music","tag-indigenous-culture","tag-indigenous-music-industry","tag-indigenous-rights","tag-mikmaq","tag-order-of-canada","tag-oscar-winner","tag-polaris-music-prize","tag-protest-songs","tag-stanley-park","tag-truth-and-reconciliation-commission","tag-universal-soldier","tag-up-where-we-belong","tag-vancouver"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=816155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/816156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=816155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=816155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=816155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}