Canadian singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, who has been active since the 1960’s as both a musician and an Indigenous activist, has come under fire for allegations that her Indigenous heritage may be false.
Sainte-Marie, who was adopted and did not know her biological parents, has denied the allegations, calling them “deeply hurtful.”
“I don’t know where I’m from or who my birth parents were, and I will never know. Which is why to be questioned in this way today is painful,” said Sainte-Marie in a statement on Thursday. “To those who question my truth, I say with love, I know who I am.”
Sainte-Marie was recently contacted by the CBC about the allegations, as they are making her the subject of their investigative TV series The Fifth Estate, which is scheduled to air on Friday.
The episode entitled, Making an Icon will cover her claimed Indigenous ancestry and the allegations that it may be false.
Sainte-Marie defended her position with a post on X, stating, “For 60 years, I’ve shared my story with the world as honestly as I know how. I am humbled my truth is one so many others have connected with. Unfortunately, some wish to question my truth. So here it is – as I know it. From me to you. Big love, Buffy.”
She called herself “a proud member of the Native community with deep roots in Canada” in a video posted to Facebook.
“But there are also many things I don’t know, which I’ve always been honest about. I don’t know where I’m from, who my birth parents are or how I ended up a misfit in a typical white Christian New England home,” she went on to say in the video.
“I realized decades ago that I would never have the answers.”
She first gained popularity in the 1960s for her songwriting with many of her songs being covered by other popular artists of the time like Elvis and Janis Joplin. She also made numerous appearances on Sesame Street.
In 1982, she became the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar for best original song, co-writing Up Where We Belong, which appeared in the film An Officer and a Gentleman.
Her adoptive parents were Albert and Winifired Sainte-Marie, her mother identified as part Mi’kmaq and was from Massachusetts.
Other accounts say their surname was Santamaria and that they were of Italian and English descent, later changing the name to Sainte-Marie to avoid anti-Italian discrimination after World War II.
According to Sainte-Marie’s authorized biography, she presumed she was born Cree on Piapot, a First Nation in the Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan around 1940, although there was no official record of her birth.
“To be born Cree in the 1940s in Canada was to be a person who was not always counted, at least not in a formal and legal fashion,” reads the biography. “Birth records from the time, particularly on reserves, were spotty, and there are countless reports of records being lost or destroyed.”
The reasons for her adoption were never made clear, some accounts were that she was born out of wedlock, while others allege her mother died in a car accident.
Some members of Sainte-Marie’s own family deny her claims that she was adopted from Saskatchewan. There are also numerous discrepancies in her account of ancestry.
“She wasn’t born in Canada.… She’s clearly born in the United States,” said Heidi St. Marie, the daughter of Sainte-Marie’s older brother, Alan. “She’s clearly not Indigenous or Native American.”
Documents obtained by CBC support the claim of her niece, including a birth certificate of Sainte-Marie from Stoneham, Mass. that said she was born in 1941.
Sainte-Marie and both of her parents are listed as white on the document.
Her marriage certificate, a life insurance policy and a United States census all corroborate the information listed on the birth certificate.
The Piapot Family however said she was adopted into their family in the traditional way in a recent statement made to combat the allegations, which they called “hurtful, ignorant, colonial and racist.”
“We claim her as a member of our family and all of our family members are from the Piapot First Nation. To us, that holds far more weight than any paper documentation or colonial record keeping ever could,” reads the Piapot family statement.
