Who is the real Buffy Sainte-Marie?
Who is the real Buffy Sainte-Marie?
Buffy Sainte-Marie’s claims to Indigenous ancestry are being contradicted by members of the iconic singer-songwriter’s own family and an extensive CBC investigation.
By Geoff Leo, Roxanna Woloshyn and Linda Guerriero • CBC News
You're viewing a single thread.
I'm personally going to be waiting to hear what the Cree Tribe has to say before passing any judgement. The issue of tribal membership based on genetic heritage often leads to intense pain and disruption of families, especially when natives themselves don't get to be part of the conversation.
I'm 1/4 Siksika Blackfoot genetically. My father was raised by his grandmother, who was adopted by Catholics, and my great-grandmother was raised in a Catholic boarding school for Indians. I have no natural cultural connection to my tribe through my family, nor have I lived on tribal land, nor have I done much for my tribe, yet I am still eligible for some tribal benefits.
So I just have to ask these questions out loud: If Buffy isn't native then why should I be considered so? Is the discrimination I've faced really so irrelevant in light of the imperceivable framework that builds my cells? Should the US government's requirements on Indian blood testing be how we personally decide who's tribal and who isn't, damned what the tribes say?
They literally have her Massachusetts birth certificate. There is nothing tying her to being indigenous except her wanting to be perceived as such.
That's far from true my friend. Buffy has been accepted and celebrated as an indigenous voice in music. She was born on the Piapiat reservation, and was even adopted by the son of one of their Chiefs. She founded indigenous teaching projects for youth. She has been a spokesperson for MMIW, and has been widely celebrated at many powwows of many tribes.
Did you miss the part where they've found a birth certificate showing that she was not born on any reservation.
She also made official reference to her birthplace as part of getting married in 1982, just to seal the deal.
She was born on the Piapiat reservation
Uh, no, she wasn't. She was born in Maine to white parents.
She may have joined the Cree nation but it seems likely it was under false pretenses.
I'm sure that she has done a lot for indigenous people and deserves some accolades but if she accepted money or awards that was meant for people that faced prejudice and oppression that's wildly inappropriate.
As a full blooded indigenous person the news about this completely sucks
The message is .....
- being full blooded means nothing
- being successful and having money means you can say do and become whatever you want to be
This revelation doesn't say that much about Santamaria .... it says so much about how everyone doesn't really care about full or mostly blooded native individuals.
Kinda curious, why should anyone care how much "indigenous blood" you have. Shouldn't your personal circumstance, history, and culture be a more important focus than your genetics?
I think the fact this is coming out now and is being discussed so much means that a lot of people really care about full/mostly-full blooded native individuals, and that they feel this sort of misrepresentation of heritage is wrong and harmful.
The fact it’s taken 60 years to get to this point says something sad about how much people cared about this in the past — but I’d like to think the attention this story is getting means this is changing for the better, and that most settler Canadians don’t agree that people should be allowed to misrepresent their heritage to the ultimate detriment of the First Nations people of this country.
Her adoptive first nations family still claims her: https://globalnews.ca/news/10049385/buffy-sainte-marie-accusations-identity/
It's not just a question of blood quantum .... it's basically a question of theft .... theft of identity, theft of culture and misrepresentation.
If I claimed I was cousin and I made a million dollars because of it, how would you feel about it? If everything I own, everything I did, every award I gained and every time I was celebrated it was because everyone said I was your cousin ... how would you feel about that?
It doesn't matter if there is no money involved .... but it matters a lot when someone starts making millions out of it all.
It's also sadistic .... to think that a person could build an identity, a persona, a career worth millions on the backs of oppressed, poor people that have no chance, and then show no remorse for it all. Her career is based on what she stole from people who already had nothing. The world gave her millions so that she could share a few thousand.
It's sickening ... and to defend all that or be apologetic about it all is not right either.
There is a big gulf between “belonging to a tribe” and claiming to be a Sixty’s Scoop survivor born at a hospital that never existed.
I don’t think anyone (certainly not the CBC) is claiming that the Cree Nation and the Piapot family weren’t allowed to adopt her, and that she isn’t a member of that nation. But the evidence points, beyond the shadow of doubt, that she was born to a white Italian American family in Boston. And that she has a long history of lying about her original heritage (often changing the story when it’s convenient for her), and threatening her own family if they outed her.
So she’s perfectly allowed to be “tribal” — that seems to not be in contention. But she shouldn’t be lying about being a Sixty’s Scoop baby who never knew her birth mother (which is odd, considering she would have been a teenager when the Scoop started in the 50’s), or about being born in Canada and adopted (both her birth certificate and her own family refute this), or about her birth certificate having been destroyed in a fire in a facility that never existed, or about her changing tribal heritage (first Mi’kmaq, then Algonquin, then Cree), or about whether her mother was dead or alive…
The lies are the problem, along with the benefits she’s obtained from those lies. If the relevant Cree Nation wants to keep her, and the Piapot family claims her as one of their own — that’s perfectly fine and within their right. But that doesn’t give Ms. St-Marie the right to rewrite her own personal history. There is a big difference between “citizenship”, “family bonds”, and “heritage” — and it’s the latter of which she appears to have lied about for a very, very, very long time.