An in depth investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Company has raised questions in regards to the indigenous persona of singer/songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie.
Sainte-Marie has been feted as the primary Indigenous individual to win an Academy Award for cowriting the music Up The place We Belong for the movie An Officer and a Gentleman.
Sainte-Marie, 82, has claimed that she was born on Tribal land and adopted by white mother and father. The CBC countered that in a report revealed Friday and in an accompanying episode of the documentary collection The Fifth Property. The media outlet obtained a beginning certificates saying Sainte-Marie was born to folks of European ancestry in Massachusetts.
The CBC reported that the beginning certificates from Stoneham, Mass. confirmed “Beverly Jean Santamaria” and her mother and father listed as white. The CBC stated it had the doc authenticated by Stoneham city clerk Maria Sagarino.
Sainte-Marie, alerted to the revelations that might be coming, issued an announcement posted to social media Thursday.
“I’m pleased with my Indigenous-American household, and the deep ties I’ve to Canada and my Piapot household,” Sainte-Marie wrote. The Piapot are the Cree household that formally adopted her as a younger grownup within the ’60s.
She added, “My Indigenous id is rooted in a deep connection to a group which has had a profound position shaping my life and my work.” She added that the CBC allegations “compelled me to relive and defend my expertise as a survivor of sexual abuse, which I endured by the hands of my brother,” Alan St. Marie.
The CBC’s report stated Sainte-Marie didn’t increase such allegations towards her brother till he began disputing her claims of Indigenous ancestry in correspondence with numerous media shops (together with the Denver Put up and PBS public radio) within the early ’70s. Sainte-Marie herself raised the brother’s claims in her 2018 autobiography. The brother died in 2011.
The CBC stated newspaper reviews from the start of Sainte-Marie’s musical profession in 1963 discovered that “within the house of these 10 months, she was known as Algonquin, full-blooded Algonquin, Mi’kmaq, half-Mi’kmaq, and Cree.”
The CBC’s professional supply, lawyer and “Indigenous id fraud” professional Jean Teillet, stated these mix-ups are hardly incidental, since these nations hail from completely different elements of Canada. The Mi’kmaq dwell on the East Coast, Algonquin individuals are from Ontario and northern Quebec, and Cree individuals are primarily from the prairies.
The allegations towards Sainte-Marie recall these made towards Sacheen Littlefeather, the activist who declined Marlon Brando’s Oscar on stage in 1973.
