Canada’s most prominent Indigenous icon might not be Indigenous
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
TORONTO — Michelle Good still has the ticket stub, a memento of the last concert she attended with her mother. It was April 29, 1996. Onstage at the Vogue Theater in Vancouver that night: Buffy Sainte-Marie.
But a new report has cast doubt on her claim to Indigenous ancestry, unleashing waves of emotions — shock, denial, grief, anger — among Indigenous people here and reviving fraught conversations about what it means to identify as Indigenous in Canada.
“It’s a little bit like an earthquake ripped through the Indigenous community,” said Jean Teillet, an Indigenous rights lawyer in British Columbia and the author of an 86-page report commissioned by the University of Saskatchewan on Indigenous identity fraud and how to detect and deter it.
Good said she’d heard whispers last year that Sainte-Marie might not actually be Indigenous but dismissed the idea as incredible. Then she saw the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. investigation.
“So many people are going to just feel so destroyed,” she thought.
The allegations about Sainte-Marie are the latest in a series in Canada and the United States in which prominent figures — in media, academia, law and beyond — have been accused of falsely claiming and appropriating Indigenous ancestry.
Sainte-Marie, 82, has said she was born on the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan and adopted as an infant by a White family in Massachusetts. She has claimed she was reunited with members of her Piapot family as an adult and adopted into their community in accordance with Cree law.
Asked about her early years in a 2018 NPR interview, Sainte-Marie spoke of the Sixties Scoop, a program through which the government took Indigenous children from their families and put them up for adoption by non-Indigenous parents to assimilate them into Canada’s dominant non-Indigenous society. The program began a decade after her 1941 birth.
The CBC based its investigation on public records and interviews, including with estranged family members. A Massachusetts birth certificate says she was born Beverly Jean Santamaria to Albert and Winifred Santamaria — the parents she said adopted her. They had Italian and English ancestry.
The investigation documented shifting statements that Sainte-Marie has provided on her origins, including articles from early in her career in which she was described variously as American Indian, then Algonquin, then Mi’kmaq and then Cree — a sign, analysts said, that a person might be faking their identity.
In a statement before the investigation aired, Sainte-Marie said her “growing up mother,” who was part Mi’kmaq, told her she was adopted and was Indigenous, “but there was no documentation as was common” for Indigenous children born in the 1940s — a claim some analysts have disputed.
“All I can say is what I know to be true: I know who I love, I know who loves me,” Sainte-Marie said. “And I know who claims me. I may not know where I was born, but I know who I am.”
Delia Opekokew, a former lawyer for Sainte-Marie, said in a signed affidavit last month that she had “no doubt Buffy Sainte-Marie is an Indigenous women with community accountability through her Piapot family in Saskatchewan.” The affidavit was not included in the CBC investigation.
The CBC found other records, including Sainte-Marie’s marriage certificate, in which she or her Massachusetts family members certified that she was born there in 1941 to Albert and Winifred.
Sainte-Marie herself has spoken critically of people who have embellished or lied about their Indigenous identity. She told the Los Angeles Times in 1986 of the reaction she got when she told people she was Cree.
“One out of 10 people will come up with the standard American line, ‘My grandmother was a full-blooded,’ quote, ‘Cherokee Indian princess,’” she said. “I just laugh. I know thousands of Cherokees, and I’ve never met one whose grandmother was an Indian princess. But it’s a shame, because it indicates people do have an interest, a pride in even the possibility that they may be part Indian.”
“To us, that holds far more weight than any paper documentation or colonial record-keeping ever could,” they said. “We are a sovereign nation, a sovereign people — Canada does not get to determine who we claim as family, and neither does the media.”
Some draw a distinction between being adopted into a Cree family under tribal law and customs, being granted citizenship to a First Nation and having Indigenous ancestry. The rules for obtaining citizenship vary depending on the Nation.
Indigenous people say that falsely claiming and appropriating their identity siphons away resources and opportunities from Indigenous people and fuels harmful stereotypes in a country where the real trauma Indigenous people have experienced has often been dismissed.
Rogers recently published “Blood Sport,” a play in which people are made to prove their Indigenous identity in a game show. She started work on it more than a year ago. She found much to draw on, she said, from cases in the headlines and in her personal life.
Good sees false claims “as another tool to assimilate and terminate us.”
The Indigenous Women’s Collective said that Sainte-Marie had “engaged in a great deception” and called on the Juno Awards, Canada’s Grammys, to rescind her 2018 award for Indigenous music album of the year.
Kim TallBear, a professor of Native studies at the University of Alberta, said that “what has hurt a lot of people is that she would steal the particular story of some of the most vulnerable,” such as survivors of the Sixties Scoop.
After the investigation was published, 15 survivors from across Canada gathered on a Zoom call to support one another. Colleen Hele-Cardinal, co-founder of the Sixties Scoop Network, said no one defended Sainte-Marie.
Many survivors seek as adults to reconnect with their home communities — a process that can be difficult and emotionally taxing. Sainte-Marie, she said, seemed to have it easy.
“It’s the betrayal of having somebody use the very thing that was taken from us — our culture and our communities — and to use it to benefit themselves in their career,” Hele-Cardinal said. “That was the biggest thing — the betrayal and how long it went on for.”
For many, grappling with the revelations is complicated.
Eden Fineday, publisher of IndigiNews, wrote in a column that it’s “always the Indigenous community that carries the burden of these revelations.” She asked what is accomplished when a woman of Sainte-Marie’s age “is accused of lying to us for decades.”
“Who benefits?” she wrote. “Perhaps it is too soon to tell. For me, there is no freedom in these implied revelations, no greater truth that brings light to the darkness of the world. There are only more questions and the grief of betrayal.”
Good had a suggestion for Sainte-Marie.
“What I think she could do to ameliorate some of the harm is to just come forward with the truth,” she said. “And to apologize.”
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Until this fleshes out I have no comment.
Another mess, it is quite possible that she was part of the ''scoop'' same situation is in the US. Tribes differ from the government in adoption and who and who isn't indigenous.
This should be an on going circus for some time.
I read about this earlier in the week. wtf?
It will be telling who celebrates this revelation if…if confirmed.
She has lived her life as a member of a tribe. That should be enough.
The reports state that she is not indigenous not what tribe she belongs to. A First Nations person can be First Nation and not associate with any particular tribe or more than one. A DNA test will only show what % First Nations she is and it cannot tell from what tribe she came from.
She was authenticated by a Cree lawyer and her adopted parents as being Cree. What is unknown to most non Indians is that the blood quantum rule is a rule by the Canadian and US governments not by the First Nations themselves. If, before that nonsense took over if a child was adopted by a Cree family, they were Cree, period.
3.1 is locked to prevent it from getting worse, charger
And yet you voted up #7?
She's as phony as Lizzy Warren.
Maybe you should wait for a gene jury to rule on that.
I met Buffy during the summer of 1964 when she came to Toronto to see the Mariposa Folk Festival. It was then that I also met and became friends with Joni Anderson. I thought Buffy looked more Indian than any Indian person I knew, and I knew quite a few. I suppose a DNA test of the descendants of Albert and Winifred Santamaria who are noted to be her parents on a birth certificate as compared with Buffy's DNA might help to solve the mystery and either prove or disprove her allegations.