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A detailed investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has raised questions about the original character of singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie.
Sainte-Marie was honored as the first Indigenous person to win an Academy Award for writing the song Where we belong For the movie Officer and gentleman.
St. Mary, 82, claimed she was born on tribal land and adopted by white parents. CBC responded to this in a report published on Friday and in an accompanying episode of the documentary series Fifth District. The media obtained a birth certificate saying that Saint Mary was born to parents of European descent in Massachusetts.
The birth certificate from Stoneham, Massachusetts, showed “Beverly Jean Santamaria” and her parents were listed as white, CBC reported. CBC said it obtained the document, which was authenticated by Maria Sagarino, Stoneham’s city clerk.
St. Mary’s, alerted to what was to come, issued a statement posted on social media on Thursday.
“I am proud of my Native American family, and the deep ties I have to Canada and my family to Peapot,” St. Mary wrote. Piapot’s family is the Cree family that formally adopted her as a young woman in the 1960s.
She added: “My indigenous identity is rooted in a deep connection to the community that has had a profound role in shaping my life and work.” She added that the CBC allegations “forced me to revive and defend my experience as a survivor of the sexual assault I suffered at the hands of my brother, Alan St. Marie.”
The CBC report said that St. Mary did not raise such allegations against her brother until he began to question her claims of Indigenous lineage in correspondence with various media outlets (including Denver Post Radio and PBS Public Radio) in the early 1970s. St. Mary herself raised the brother’s allegations in her 2018 autobiography. The brother died in 2011.
CBC said press reports from the beginning of Sainte-Marie’s music career in 1963 found that “within those 10 months, she was referred to as Algonquin, full-blood Algonquin, Mi’kmaq, half-Mi’kmaq, and Cree.”
Jean Thier, a CBC source, lawyer and Indigenous identity fraud expert, said these mix-ups are not accidental, because the nations hail from different parts of Canada. The Mi’kmaq people live on the east coast, the Algonquin people are from Ontario and northern Quebec, and the Cree people are primarily from the prairies.
The allegations against St. Mary’s are reminiscent of those made against Sachin Littlefeather, the activist who refused Marlon Brando an Oscar on stage in 1973.
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