People singer Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous roots questioned

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By Allie Griffin

Oscar-winning folks singer Buffy Sainte-Marie has lengthy been considered as a barrier-breaking, Indigenous icon — however a latest information investigation has raised doubts over her Indigenous roots.

A Canadian Broadcast Corporation feature on the singer-songwriter has led to accusations that Sainte-Marie is a “pretendian” — the time period coined for individuals who faux having Indigenous ancestry.

Sainte-Marie, 82, claimed that she was born on a Piapot Cree reservation in Canada and was adopted by white mother and father as a part of the nation’s notorious Sixties Scoop by which Indigenous kids had been faraway from their households and adopted by white households in a authorities coverage of pressured assimilation.

However the latest CBC report cites a beginning certificates that states the singer was born “Beverly Jean Santamaria” in Stoneham, Massachusetts to folks of European lineage.

It additionally quotes a number of members of the family who declare “her story is an elaborate fabrication.”

Sainte-Marie shared her Cree tradition with youths throughout the nation when she appeared on Sesame Road within the Seventies and he or she has received quite a few awards together with an Oscar in 1983 for co-writing the track “Up The place We Belong” — for which she turned thought-about the primary Indigenous individual to win the distinguished award.

She rose to success amongst different folks singers within the early Sixties and has reappeared in popular culture lately due to reveals, podcasts and documentaries on her life legacy and work combating for Indigenous folks.

In 2021, Sainte-Marie’s face even appeared on a Canadian stamp.

The importance of her function inside Indigenous communities, particularly these in Canada, made her potential fraud all of the extra stunning and hurtful to members of these communities who really feel their heritage, ache and historical past had been stolen for her benefit.

“It’s theft of alternatives, assets. It’s theft of our tales,” Indigenous scholar Kim TallBear, a professor of Native research on the College of Alberta in Edmonton, advised CBC.

The folks singer known as the allegations “hurtful” in a statement released earlier than the CBC report was printed, figuring out what was to return.

She wrote that what she is aware of of her Indigenous ancestry, she discovered from her “rising up mom” and her personal analysis later in life.

“My mom advised me many issues, together with that I used to be adopted and that I used to be Native, however there was no documentation as was frequent for Indigenous kids born within the 1940’s,” Sainte-Marie stated.

She added that she doesn’t know the place she is from or who her beginning mother and father had been and “won’t ever know.”

What she does know, she stated, is that she was adopted by a Piapot First Nation couple, Emile Piapot and Clara Starblanket Paipot, “in accordance with Cree legislation and customs” as a younger grownup.

Sainte-Marie provides one other title to a rising checklist of distinguished Indigenous figures whose ancestry has been questioned as fraudulent, together with Sacheen Littlefeather — whose obvious lies had been outed by her sisters after her demise.