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Notes -
Canada's most famous indigenous woman: not indigenous, not even Canadian
Buffy Ste-Marie is a musician. She has a deep discography of folk music that incorporates her indigenous identity and activism. She has lived a long and productive life as arguably the most famous Canadian indigenous woman. For Americans she's probably better known as the first woman to breastfeed on television, an interesting milestone in its own right. It's also good that this proves she's a woman, as it's the only element of her public identity that is still standing. In news that should shock exactly zero people who are tangentially aware of the notion of "Pretendians" in Canadian high society, the CBC has rather convincing evidence that Buffy Ste-Marie's version of her life's history is fraudulent.
The details have changed over the years - a sign in itself, if anyone would have risked official censure to point it out - but in general Ste-Marie has claimed herself to have been born to a Piapot Cree woman, and then subsequently removed from her birth mother (either because of her death, or forcibly as part of the "Sixties Scoop", which should have itself been a red flag considering she was born in 1941). She claimed to have been adopted by an American family, and later reconnected with and adopted by her birth people in Canada. Well, the documentary evidence seems fairly irrefutable: her "adoptive" parents were her birth parents. Her siblings are her full-siblings. She was born Beverly Santamaria in Massachusetts, and has no ancestral connection to Canada at all. Her father was Italian, her mother English.
She appears to have begun claiming Indian ancestry in her early 20s, first claiming to be Mi'kmaq, a perhaps more believable white lie having grown up in New England. Alternatively, she said she was Algonqiun. A few years later she claimed she was Cree, which prompted her paternal uncle to correct a local newspaper on that fact in 1964. In the next few decades as her career began to take off, coinciding with a general surge of interest in Native American arts and culture, she increasingly resorted to legal threats to silence her family members from contradicting her self-constructed origin story, including threatening her brother that she would tell the world that he had sexually abused her.
I've been watching the trickle of responses over the past day on reddit as news this piece was coming out spread. This thread on /r/indiancountry is generally defensive, arguing that irrespective of the exact circumstances of her birth that she is legitimately indigenous via ceremonial adoption in her 20s. I think these kind of arguments will melt away now that the CBC investigation has been published. It seems clear to me that Ste-Marie's story was not borne of confusion or innocent mistake, but was rather a deliberately and cynically constructed narrative that was upheld through threats and intimidation. The investigation was much more thorough and dug into a lot more nasty stuff than I expected. Ste-Marie was a Canadian legend, and had been endlessly fêted by the CBC (and other Canadian media) prior to this. I would point out that although the CBC has generally gone mushy progressive, its investigative journalism programs, namely Marketplace and The Fifth Estate (who undertook this project) have remained excellent and provide very good value for taxpayer money.
I was highly surprised by this, and looking up Wikipedia it says there that her mother claimed to have Mi'kmaq ancestry, so maybe it started off as the same kind of Elizabeth Warren "my family history says we have Native ancestry" notion, but since there was that surge of interest in Native American issues in the 60s/70s, she found it a better idea to claim more ancestry than she had, and by shifting it to Canada rather than New England, make it harder for the US side to trace where exactly she supposedly came from:
Maybe. Who knows? Certainly if you wanted a career in folk music in the 50s/60s, having some claim to Latino or Indigenous or the like ethnicity was an advantage, and if you're a music promoter and a lassie with black hair and olive complexion walks into your office claiming to be Canadian Indigenous, are you going to call her a liar?
The interesting thing about Buffy is that although this was apparently her official bio/story very early on, she didn't really lean into it much until the early/mid seventies when she was already well established. She had the odd song on the sixties albums relating to Indian issues, but most of it was kind of standard hippie/folky stuff. Certainly the big hits written by her ('Lift us up' and 'Universal Soldier', off the top of my head) had no such themes. It's not like she burst on the scene in buckskins and moccasins; she just dresses like a regular hippy in most of the images I can gather, really until almost the 80s/90s.
ED: I'm actually more concerned how come she's LARPing as Canadian at all -- did she get citizenship based on the orphan claim, or what?
Perhaps this is not "really" leaning into it, but here's an early TV appearance:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=KwOyconXiGM
(Incidentally, that's a terrible song. I listened to several of her songs and the melody was awful in just about all of them. I usually enjoy 1960s/early 1970s folk or folky hippie music, but the combination of intense sincerity and awkward melody made me suspect that I have a very filtered knowledge of that period's progressive folk music.)
Universal Soldier works, but even then it's a bit stilted in terms of pure musicality
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