A Canadian documentary has revealed evidence – including official documents and family interviews – suggesting that singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, widely hailed as an Indigenous icon, was born in Massachusetts to a white couple.
And the document contains another bombshell – a claim that the Oscar winner accused her older brother of sexual abuse because he told the Sesame Street producer that she was misrepresenting her family history and heritage.
CBC News reports that it has obtained a birth certificate for Sainte-Marie showing that she was born in 1941 in Stoneham, Massachusetts, and not in Canada to a Cree woman as she has claimed. It is said that she and her parents were white.
Sainte-Marie, 82, has said in the past that the Canadian government removed her from her birthplace to be adopted by Albert and Winifred Santamaria, who then raised her in New England.
But the CBC reports that an insurance policy that Winifred Santamaria took out for Buffy – then called Beverly – confirms that she was born in Stoneham in 1941, and that her older brother Alan also listed this on military registration papers in 1956.
A 1982 marriage certificate signed by Buffy Saint-Marie, obtained by the CBC from Los Angeles County, says she was born on February 20, 1941 in Massachusetts to Albert and Winifred St. Marie.
“She wasn’t born in Canada … She was clearly born in the United States,” said niece Heidi St. Marie, the daughter of Alan, who died more than a decade ago. “She is clearly not Indigenous or Native American.”
“No one but Buffy has ever talked about Buffy being adopted,” she added.
And it appears this isn’t the first time someone has made the report. The CBC team dug up a 1964 Wakefield Daily Item article in which her paternal uncle pushed back against a Look magazine profile that described Buffy as a Native American.
“After reading the story, I thought I should come and tell you the truth about Buffy,” he was quoted as saying. “She doesn’t sound like the girl who grew up here in that magazine story.” He added that his niece “has no Indian blood in her.”
The CBC also obtained a scathing letter the singer wrote to her brother, allegedly after he told a PBS producer that his sister was white – prompting a stern rebuke from her lawyers.
“Alan, you undoubtedly remember your ongoing sexual abuse throughout my childhood,” she wrote. “According to my memories and my childhood diaries, you are nothing but a child molester and a sadist.”
“The guilt caused you to try to hurt me through a children’s show,” she continued. “If you ever try to hurt me again, I will explain the causes of your illness to your employers and your wife and unleash the police on you.”
She later went public with her abuse allegations, but only after Alan’s death.
In a preemptive strike against the documentary, Sainte-Marie released a statement earlier this week calling the allegations “deeply hurtful.”
“What I have always been honest about is that I don’t know where I come from or who my birth parents were, and I will never know,” she wrote. “I can only say what I know to be true: I know who I love, I know who loves me. And I know who claims me.”
“My Indigenous identity is rooted in a deep connection to a community that has significantly shaped my life and work. “All my life, I have advocated for Native American and Native American causes even though no one else wanted to or had the platform to do so,” she added. “I may not know where I was born, but I know who I am.”
Her lawyer, Josephine de Whytell, told the CBC last month that “at no time has Buffy Sainte-Marie personally misrepresented her parentage or any details about her personal history to the public.”
De Whytell also downplayed the importance of the birth certificate, writing, “Research has also shown that children adopted by parents in Massachusetts were often issued new Massachusetts birth certificates with their adoptive parents’ names on them.”
But the CBC said Stoneham numbered the birth certificates chronologically, and Sainte-Maries’ number indicates it was filed in 1941.