“Five years on Sesame Street,” the Port Fairy Folk Festival debutante laughed.

“That was really, really rewarding. They called me up to say some ABCs and count to 10 and I said ‘I’m too busy for that’.

“But then I asked them if they’d done any Native American programming and they called me back and said ‘yeah, we want to do that’.”

As a Native American — a Canadian Cree to be exact — Sainte-Marie has been as influential and recognised over the past 50 years for her social activism as much as her music, which is partly why she counts a kids’ TV show as more significant than an Oscar.

“I got to bring Sesame Street to a reservation and to Hawaii,” the 73-year-old said.

“We did multicultural things, we did things on breastfeeding ... it was a good balance (for me) between learning from new people and guiding people to something they didn’t know.

“As for the Academy Award, from that I learnt how to wear a pink sequin dress.”

She won the Oscar for co-writing the song Up Where We Belong for the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman.

In fact, it was her time on Sesame Street that made her a famous face in Hawaii, which she has called home for 50 years.

Despite writing such seminal ’60s folk songs as Universal Soldier, Now That The Buffalo’s Gone and Until It’s Time For You To Go, she said hardly anyone in Hawaii knows who she is — which is just the way she likes it.

“I like living in Hawaii because I’m anonymous and invisible,” she explained.

“I’m able to be a real person in a real community and they don’t know what I do.

“I came here under another name, and it wasn’t until the Sesame Street thing that people started putting two and two together.

“But everybody’s forgotten about that now,” she laughed.

Outside her island home and her “farm in the middle of nowhere”, Sainte-Marie has “a level of fame that means I can travel and tour and pump up my ego”.

“The reason I still love to (tour) is because I was smart enough to move to a farm in the ’60s,” she said.

“I can come back here and refill — picture a sponge filling up with nature and time and creativity. That’s what happens when I come back here. I don’t go out on the road for more than three weeks at a time, and then I go home for three weeks.

“You have to be smart about it — the people who last in this industry are smart about it.”

It could be argued Sainte-Marie has also endured due to a willingness to continually evolve. 

Even back in the late ’60s, she was shaking up the expectations of her folkie fans by making the album Illuminations which prominently featured synthesizers — shunned upon the release, the record is now a cult favourite and was featured by Wire magazine in 2000 on its list of “100 Albums that Set the World on Fire While No-One was Listening”.

“Whether it’s my first album or my second or my 15th or my 20th, everything was mixed together and there were always different types of songs,” she said. “I’m still influenced by everything that come across my screen. I catch it and I play with it. The technology has changed. It’s made it much easier (to make music). It used to be really hard.

“People don’t understand (with electronic music) that it’s the same old head and the same old heart. When I first started using a computer to make music, people thought it was going to sound like Star Wars.

“But a computer doesn’t replace the human voice or a guitar any more than a guitar replaces a piano. There’s just more tools and more wonderful ways to make music.”

Sainte-Marie has been touring Australia regularly since the ’60s, but will make her Port Fairy Folk Festival debut in March with a setlist that mixes her classics with some new music, including tracks from her album due out in May.