Already winner of a JUNO in Canada as Aboriginal Album Of The Year, it's licensed to Cooking Vinyl in the UK but for America, where it's due out in August, it will fittingly mark the 100th release on the Appleseed label.

It opens in full blooded style with No No Keshagesh, a stinging attack on corporate greed (the title translates as Greedy Guts, as in those who consume their own and everyone else's too) in which, set to a driving tribal rhythm and 'powwow' vocals, she sings about those who've "got Mother Nature on a luncheon plate, they carve her up and call it real estate."

She's in equally powerful protest mood on the funky dance mojo working R&B streaked Working For The Government addresses "that age-old money-laundering enterprise called war", stomping the groove like a Cree version of Tina Turner while the spooked hypnotic mantra Little Wheel Spin And Spin comments on how individual prejudices are the building blocks for hate movements.

It's not all about rant, though.

Her cultural, ethnic and musical roots again evidence, Cho Cho Fire is an urgent number about having fun, a sort of Native American party hard that, utilising an old powwwow sample, references the drumming frenzy of the experience. In similar frame of mind, Blue Sunday's a rock n rolling homage to the young Elvis whose slap-back recording sound, she says, changed her life. Musically, it's probably the album's most inconsequential throwaway, but it still gets the blood jumping, and sounds like it was written to be felt live. The same holds true of I Bet My Heart On You, a ragged barrelhouse New Orleans boogie with Taj Mahal duetting on piano.

For the rest, she's in quieter, more melancholic, romantic or, on Still This Love Goes On's folksy homespun dreams of home, wistful mood. With a guitar line that echoes In The Ghetto, a notable highlight is Too Much Is Never Enough, a soaringly tender love song that showcases that Sainte-Marie warble while of no less merit you'll find To The Ends Of The World, a bluesy torch number that, deliberately or not, evokes Skeeter Davis classic The End Of The World, and the touching Easy Like The Snow Falls Down , a sort of Lean On Me dedicated to hospice workers helping families struck by dementia and Alzheimers.

Sainte-Marie has described how, in the 70s, she and others in the Red Power movements, had been blacklisted and effectively put out of business, Lyndon Johnson apparently writing letters in the 80s praising radio stations that had suppressed her music. All the more poignant then to hear her sing America The Beautiful on which she gives the traditional national anthem a little twist with 'words and music Ind'n style' of her own. Hers may be a different drum, but it beats proud from sea to shining sea.

Fans and newcomers alike should seek out the special edition featuring hour long documentary A Multimedia Life which, through present day interviews (with herself and the likes of Eric Andersen, Joni Mitchell and Robbie Robertson), archive footage and photos, and live performance (including a vintage Universal Soldier) charts her background, life and career.