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A detailed investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has raised questions about singer/songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous personality.
Sainte-Marie was celebrated as the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar for co-writing the song “Up Where We Belong” for the film “An Officer and a Gentleman.”
Sainte-Marie, 82, has claimed she was born on tribal land and adopted by white parents. The CBC responded in a report published Friday and in an accompanying episode of the documentary series The Fifth Estate. The media company obtained a birth certificate showing that Sainte-Marie was born in Massachusetts to European ancestry.
The CBC reported that the birth certificate from Stoneham, Massachusetts, listed “Beverly Jean Santamaria” and her parents as white. The CBC said it had the document notarized by Stoneham Town Clerk Maria Sagarino.
Alarmed by the impending revelations, Sainte-Marie released a statement on social media on Thursday.
“I am proud of my Indigenous American family and the deep ties I have to Canada and my Piapot family,” Sainte-Marie wrote. The Piapot are the Cree family who officially adopted her as a young adult in the 1960s.
She added: “My Indigenous identity is rooted in a deep connection to a community that has profoundly shaped my life and work.” She added that the CBC allegations “forced me to examine my experience as a survivor of sexual abuse, to relive and defend what I suffered at the hands of my brother Alan St. Marie.”
The CBC report states that Sainte-Marie only made such allegations against her brother when he began airing her claims of indigenous ancestry in correspondence with various media outlets (including the Denver Post and PBS public radio) in the early 1970s deny. Sainte-Marie herself made the brother’s claims in her 2018 autobiography. The brother died in 2011.
According to the CBC, newspaper reports early in Sainte-Marie’s musical career in 1963 stated that “during those ten months she was referred to as Algonquin, full-blooded Algonquin, Mi’kmaq, half-Mi’kmaq, etc. Cree.”
CBC’s expert source, lawyer and Indigenous identity fraud expert Jean Teillet, said these mix-ups were no coincidence as these nations came from different parts of Canada. The Mi’kmaq live on the East Coast, the Algonquin are from Ontario and northern Quebec, and the Cree are primarily from the Prairies.
The allegations against Sainte-Marie are reminiscent of those against Sacheen Littlefeather, the activist who rejected Marlon Brando’s Oscar on stage in 1973.