Goodbye Buffy, Hello Bev

According to The Daily Beast

A Canadian documentary has unveiled evidence – including official documents and family interviews – that it says suggests singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, widely celebrated as an indigenous icon, was born in Massachusetts to a white couple.

And the doc contains another bombshell—an allegation that the Oscar winner accused her older brother of sexual abuse because he told producers for Sesame Street that she was misrepresenting her family history and heritage.

CBC News reports that it obtained a birth certificate for Sainte-Marie that shows she was born in 1941 in Stoneham, Massachusetts, as Beverly Santamaria, and not in Canada to a Cree woman, as she has claimed. It says 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.

If I had musical heroes then Buffy Sainte-Marie would definitely come near the top of the list. I have liked her music since my youth, and I still remember seeing her perform, in support of Coincidence & Likely Stories with John Trudell as her support act.

You can read all the evidence that CBC came up with here on their website and it looks pretty incontrovertible. Her response has aimed for the poetic rather than the literal, and raises interesting questions of its own. How long do you have to have lived as a native American to “be” a native American? That sort of thing.

The whole business saddens me, not least because it seems much more complicated than mere appropriation. This bears no relationship to white pop stars wearing their hair in corn rows and twerking.

However it started, and why ever it started, I think we can safely say that “being Native American” has defined Buffy Sainte-Marie’s entire adult life, and that she has worked hard for Native American rights and rights to their own culture. To have it end like this seems desperately sad; not just for her, but for many other people too.