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
Fucking hell ..... That pisses me off to no end
This world is fucked and these fucking white assholes are fucked.
I'm full blooded indigenous born and raised with my family in the north ... my first language is Ojibwe-Cree, I spoke it with my family for the first ten years of my life .... and all I've ever felt was shame for who I was and where I was born
To hear these revelations about people like Joseph Boyden, judge Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond and professor Carrie Bourassa. .... And now Buffy St Marie .... I fucking looked up to Buffy, most of indigenous Canada grew up with her.
One of the messed up parts of this story to me is I know and I am friends with lots of Mohawks from Six Nations and I heard many stories from their families about discrimination in southern Ontario. They had second world war veterans who couldn't even find work because they were Indian so the only way they could get around that was to pass themselves off as ITALIAN!
It's twisted .... Indians were passing themselves off as Italian to avoid being identified as Indian to make a basic living.... and at the same time an Italian was passing herself off as Indian and making a fortune.
It makes me feel sick to my core.
That fucking bitch..... What a wicked evil person it is to think it's acceptable to take on the identity of an oppressed people and live off their misery and misfortune.
Fuck you Buffy
Or should I say fuck you Beverly Jean Santamaria
It really saddens me to hear that you feel/felt that way about your identity/origins. I value the existence of you and your culture.
My thoughts:
As a settler Canadian I've been told blood quantum is a racist colonial concept, and what really makes a person indigenous is if they are embraced as a member of a first nation community.
So my initial reaction (ie to the revelation she has european roots) was:
It's a person's life that makes them indigenous, not their genes. It doesn't really matter if she was born off reserve to settler parents, if she's a member of a first nation.
The article talks about how 1962 when she was in her twenties she asked a Cree family to give her an 'Indian Name', and adopt her into their family. She says they did.
BUT It seems likely to me that she (fraudulently) presented herself to the Cree family as a 'scoop' victim to receive a sympathy name.
And then:
In the space of those 10 months [1962-1963], she was referred to as Algonquin, full-blooded Algonquin, Mi’kmaq, half-Mi’kmaq and Cree.
So clearly the naming/adoption didn't start as anything serious.
It seems to me she received the sympathy naming, then over the course of years wormed her way into the family. Actually it's pretty grotesque because the family had had a daughter Buffy's age taken from them so this was like extreme manipulation of the vulnerable.
All this is to say: Buffy didn't grow up facing the challenges of an indigenous child. Her purported accession to the Cree nation was likely based on fraud and grotesque emotional manipulation.
She has received so much of what was reserved for people that had to overcome real, actual oppression/prejudice and state abuse and trauma. Is this the biggest case of cultural appropriation in history?
I didn't even know she wasn't Canadian. This is much worse.
This is what I didn't get after watching the fifth estate program.
Santamaria (which is what I'll call her from now on) was born American and at one point in her career she is identified as Canadian .... which didn't matter much at first.
But then the Canadian government gave her awards and put her to the order of Canada ..... doesn't anyone look into backgrounds and history before bestowing these awards? ... or do they just hand them out based on your bank account?
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.
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.
I wonder how much grant money she received and stole from legitimate first nations artists over the years due to her false claims. I hope they can be repatriated back to the communities she's defrauded in some way or another.
The real Buffy Sainte-Marie is a con artist and thief of indigenous grants.
That was one hell of a report. Incontrovertible.