Buffy Sainte-Marie, Oscar-winning songwriter, questions indigenous roots in a CBC report

A detailed investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has raised questions about singer/songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous persona.

Sainte-Marie was recognized as the first indigenous person to win an Oscar for co-writing the song Up where we belong for the movie A policeman and a gentleman.

Sainte-Marie, 82, claimed she was born on tribal land and adopted by white parents. The CBC refuted this in a report released 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 parents of European descent.

The CBC reported that the birth certificate in Stoneham, Massachusetts said “Beverly Jean Santamaria” and listed her parents as white. The CBC said the document was verified by Stoneham Town Clerk Maria Sagarino.

Warning about the coming revelations, Sainte-Marie issued a statement on social media on Thursday.

“I am proud of my Indian family and the deep ties I have with Canada and my Piapot family,” Sainte-Marie wrote. The Piapot is the Cree family that 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 significantly shaped my life and work.” She added that the CBC’s allegations “forced me to reflect on my experience as a survivor of sexual abuse to relive and defend my brother Alan St. Marie.”

According to the CBC report, Sainte-Marie made such allegations against her brother only after he began challenging her claims of Native ancestry in correspondence with various media outlets (including the Denver Post and public radio PBS) in the early 1970s. Sainte-Marie herself made the brother’s claims in her 2018 autobiography. The brother died in 2011.

The CBC said that newspaper reports from the beginning of Sainte-Marie’s musical career in 1963 showed that “during those ten months she was Algonquin, full-blood Algonquin, Mi’kmaq, half-Mi’kmaq and Cree.”

The CBC’s expert source, lawyer and expert on “Indigenous identity fraud” Jean Teillet, said this confusion is not accidental, as these countries come from different parts of Canada. The Mi’kmaq live on the East Coast, the Algonquin people come from Ontario and northern Quebec, and the Cree people come mainly 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.