San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Canada’s famous Indigenous person is really Italian?
Buffy Sainte-Marie was the first Native person to win an Oscar. Now it appears she isn't actually Native.
Discovering evidence that the most famous Indigenous woman in Canada, Buffy Sainte-Marie, was neither Indigenous nor Canadian was not what I expected when I sat down with my son last year to watch her biography, “Carry It On,” on PBS. I had hoped the film would inspire him to learn about a successful Native musician.
I knew Sainte-Marie as a Cree folk singer who played alongside Bob Dylan in the 1960s. She was the first Native person to be a regular on “Sesame Street,” from 1976 to 1981, and in 1982 she became the first Native person to win an Oscar for co-writing the song “Up Where We Belong” for the film “An Officer and a Gentleman.”
Sainte-Marie’s story was tragic, but for a generation of Native kids like me, it was inspirational. She said she was born on the Piapot Reserve in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1941. Claiming to be a child of the “Sixties Scoop” that saw the mass theft of First Nations and Metis children in Canada through forced adoption and foster care placement, SainteMarie said her young Cree mother died soon after her birth, and she was adopted and raised by a white couple from Massachusetts. (Métis are mixed European and Indigenous communities that emerged as distinct socio-ethnic entities during the fur trade and are politically recognized by the Canadian government.)
As I watched the biography with my son, however, I began to see red flags in her story.
The methodology I used to spot these flags were not of my own invention. In 2021, Jean Teillet, a Métis scholar, was commissioned by the University of Saskatchewan to identify warning signs of Native identity fraud after a 2021 Canadian Broadcasting Corp. investigation revealed that a health researcher and professor at the school, Carrie Bourassa, was white and had falsely claimed to be First Nations and Métis.
Drawing from Teillet’s report, the biggest red flag I saw with Sainte-Marie was that she never went back and found her Cree family, nor provided any documentation to prove the story of her adoption.
Census records indicate there were about 400 people on the Piapot Reserve the year she was born. The number of young Cree women who died that year would have been low. Even if every young woman of childbearing age died in 1941, Sainte-Marie could have still investigated each case and met with the families. Certainly, she had the resources to do so. It seemed to me that she could have easily found a match in Saskatchewan with DNA testing.
The Cree Piapot family adopted her in 1962 as an adult, but Sainte-Marie’s story was always that she was Cree by blood. Ntawnis Piapot, a member of the family who adopted her, described the adoption to the Canadian press as taking years “of getting to know each other and trusting each other and going to ceremony and getting her Indian name … to finally look at her and be like, I acknowledge you as my daughter, you’re officially part of our family.”
Saint-Marie’s birth story didn’t make any sense. So, I did some digging.
I had only her birthdate and her adoptive parents’ names. But within minutes I found her on the Massachusetts Birth Index: Beverly Jean Santamaria, born in Stoneham, Mass., 1941.
The Massachusetts vital records office confirmed to me that only live births in the state would be found in the index. This seemingly ruled out Sainte-Marie’s birth in Saskatchewan.
I followed up with a call to Doug Bucholz, an adoptee himself who documents fake Abenaki Tribes in Vermont and who is familiar with genealogical records in New England. He called the town of Stoneham, and after paying $22 he received a copy of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate. It recorded that the Santamarias, who are Italian American, also had a son, Buffy’s older brother Alan.
Bucholz and I also found a 1964 letter to the local paper written by one of Sainte-Marie’s uncles stating that she “had not one drop of Cree” but was the natural child of his brother and sister-in-law.
We clearly had a strong case that Sainte-Marie was a fabulist. But after the global backlash I faced for outing Sacheen Littlefeather as a pretendian in 2022 in the Chronicle, I was frankly reluctant to be seen “taking down” another icon, even if the truth seemed to be on my side.
So, we turned the story over to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp’s Geoff Leo. On Oct. 27, his investigation, alongside reporters Roxanna Woloshyn and Linda Guerriero, was published by “The Fifth Estate,” the CBC’s version of “60 Minutes.”
In addition to reconfirming the information that Bucholz and I uncovered, CBC spoke to Buffy’s niece, Heidi SainteMarie, and her cousin, Bruce Santamaria. Heidi showed the CBC letters written by Buffy and her high-powered Los Angeles lawyers threatening, Buffy’s brother Alan SainteMarie, in 1975.
That year, a PBS “Sesame Street” producer called Alan and asked if he was Buffy’s brother by blood. Alan told the producer, yes, they shared the same parents. Shortly after, Alan received a letter from his sister’s attorneys (who also had represented the Rolling Stones) saying that she would pursue all legal avenues to sue him for interfering with her employment opportunities. Also enclosed
was a handwritten note from Buffy alleging he had sexually abused her as a child. If he persisted in telling people they were related, she would share this with his employer, his wife and his children.
Heidi, Alan’s daughter, tearfully presented on camera a letter her dad had written to his parents, sharing the threats. In it, he wrote that he decided to drop the issue because his sister had the deep pockets to tie him up in court for years.
Buffy’s cousin Bruce told the CBC that the entire Santamaria family feared ruinous lawsuits from the wealthy singer. Bruce said he was warned not to mention she was his relative on the playground as a kid because his family might lose their house if she sued them.
After the CBC show aired, Sainte-Marie’s sister posted on social media that Buffy was only adopted into the Cree as an adult, not adopted out.
Confronted with such damning evidence, the response to the investigation from SainteMarie’s fans seemed to follow the path of the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, for some, acceptance.
With that final stage now comes a reckoning with the full implications of her actions. In the real world, fairy tales aren’t just harmless little stories. They have consequences.
In Canada, Sainte-Marie had spent the past 30 years receiving awards meant for First Nation, Inuit and Metis artists, including a Polaris Music Prize in 2015 that came with a 50,000 Canadian dollar honorarium (about $38,000). Sainte-Marie even was made a Companion to the Order of Canada, an honor generally reserved for Canadian
citizens.
Soon after “The Fifth Estate” broadcast, calls came from First Nation/Metis Canadians for Sainte-Marie to return her Juno awards meant for Indigenous artists. Some of the artists who lost to her described their feelings of being deceived and cheated.
“Juno winners have toured the country and the world, and the runners-up get to play the neighborhood pubs and occasional summer festival,” Billy Joe Green, an Anishinaabe musician who lost Indigenous Music Album of the Year in 2009 to Buffy, told a Canadian news agency.
Karmen Omeasoo (aka HellnbacK), a First Nation hip-hop artist from Maskwacis, Alberta, who lost to SainteMarie as part of the group Team Rezofficial, said, “I’m feeling very duped. Like something was taken from me. Something was taken from all these other artists. I could have brought that hardware back home to my mom, my dad, my grandma, my kids.”
But most poignant was a post by Issiqut Anguk, the sister of Inuk performer Kelly Fraser, who took her own life at the age of 26 in December 2019. Frazier also lost a Juno award to Sainte-Marie in 2018. Alongside a screenshot of her late sister that showed Frazier congratulating Sainte-Marie for winning Indigenous Music Album of the Year, Anguk wrote:
“My heart.
“I’m all over the place. I try to stop grieving then I start thinking what if. I know I can’t bring my baby sister back but this could’ve been life changing and I’m heart broken all over again. I miss my baby sister so much. She respected Buffy so much and it hurts to hear that maybe, just maybe it would’ve changed Kelly’s life. If she won the Juno award and Buffy didn’t.
“Bleh. I can’t. My plate is full and it’s been full for too long. My heart hurts. Why does this keep happening. Imagine
“Kelly Fraser! Wins the Juno award for Indigenous album of the year!”
Anguk clarified in a later post that she was not blaming Sainte-Marie for her sister’s death. She was just wondering what it might have been like if her sister had won. After losing to Sainte-Marie, Fraser tried to raise 60,000 Canadian dollars ($48,000) for her next album. However, despite her enthusiastic and upbeat fundraiser video, her efforts only garnered about 2,648 Canadian dollars.
Fraser hoped that her music would give hope to other youth in Nunavut, where Inuit death by suicide is up to 25 times higher than the Canadian average. Tragically, hopelessness overtook her as well.
Despite all this, Saint-Marie still has supporters in Canada. One is the Piapot family that claimed her as an adult. The family had previously signed affidavits that she had been born on their reserve.
Another key supporter has been the National Sixties Scoop Healing Foundation, a private nonprofit that oversees 50 million Canadian dollars in funds dedicated to Sixties Scoop survivors. The Sixties Scoop, incidentally, began about 10 years after SainteMarie was born.
“If she is not even a Canadian citizen, that is hugely problematic,” Crystal Semaganis, a Scoop survivor who has called for the resignation of the foundation’s board members, told me.
“There’s a lot of records, many records, that exist for children that were scooped. If you are a status Indian and scooped from a reserve you exist in a very special index in Indian and Northern Affairs Canada. Every child who is scooped remained in an Indian registrar by birthday only. That is how we can go at 18 and get our status back.”
Of course, if Sainte-Marie is telling the truth, the easiest method for her to prove it would be to take a supervised DNA test with her Massachusetts family. That doesn’t appear likely to happen.
On Monday, nearly a month after the CBC report, “Carry It Home,” the documentary that set me on this path of discovering Sainte-Marie’s true origins, won an International Emmy. The film’s Anishinaabe executive producer Lisa Meeches thanked the Creator and elders in her acceptance speech. She also thanked Sainte-Marie saying, “Buffy, thank you, thank you, thank you. She’s lifting us all up where we belong, each and every person in this room.”
Do I feel uplifted by Buffy Sainte-Marie? To where I belong?
No. I feel betrayed and let down.
Sainte-Marie’s music allegedly helped answer our problem of Native invisibility. Her fame created a space for our voices to be heard. She proudly told interviewers in 1964 that her song, “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” drew attention to the flooding of Seneca land by the Kinzua Dam — something unnoticed by most New Yorkers.
My husband’s grandfather, a Mohawk Bear Clan Chief from Six Nations, was a leader in the protests against the building of that dam. My mother-in-law remembers standing in the cold day after day to fight the dam as a young teen.
The land was flooded anyway.
Does professional redface help us, really? I’m not so sure.