Canada Strips Award from (Fake) Indigenous Icon Buffy St. Marie

Buffy St. Marie started her career as a folk musician back in the early 1960s and gradually became an indigenous icon who appeared on postage stamps. 

Known for co-writing the Oscar-winning “Up Where We Belong,” writing the much-covered 1960s protest standard “Universal Soldier” and the years she appeared on “Sesame Street” — wearing traditional dress, she taught the Count to count in Cree, and in 1977 breastfed her baby on camera — Sainte-Marie has long been one of Canada’s most prominent Indigenous icons.

She’s been commemorated on Canadian postage stamps and performed for Queen Elizabeth II. “A one-name phenomenon, akin to Madonna, Cher, Elvis,” as a Globe and Mail column put it.

The postage stamp was released in 2021 by Canada Post.

Buffy Sainte-Marie is one of Canada’s most successful singer-songwriters. She’s made contributions as both a musical and visual artist, and also as an activist, educator and philanthropist dedicated to Indigenous rights. Learn more about her story: https://t.co/GrwHOW5mxP pic.twitter.com/kUvfvDxp2p

— Canada Post (@canadapostcorp) November 18, 2021

She claimed for most of her adult life to have been born on a Cree reservation in Saskatchewan, Canada and after that to have been adopted by an American family in Massachusetts. But her claims of indigenous ancestry were all a lie. In fact, she was a white girl born in America.

“She wasn’t born in Canada.… She’s clearly born in the United States,” said Heidi St. Marie, daughter of Sainte-Marie’s older brother, Alan. “She’s clearly not Indigenous or Native American.”

That claim is supported by documents obtained by CBC, including Sainte-Marie’s Stoneham, Mass., birth certificate. The investigation also shows that her account of her ancestry has been a shifting narrative, full of inconsistencies and inaccuracies.

One of the most interesting aspects of this lifelong fraud was that people knew she was not telling the truth decades ago but St. Marie always managed to keep the lie going. In 1975, her brother happened to be piloting a plane on which she was traveling along with a producer for PBS. St. Marie was appearing on Sesame Street at the time. A few weeks after the encounter, the PBS producers called the brother and asked if he was really a relative. Her brother explained that she and the entire family were white and had grown up in Massachusetts together.

The story must have circulated because months later her brother got a letter from a top entertainment law firm in California accusing him of defaming her. Inside was a handwritten letter from St. Marie herself.

“Alan, you no doubt remember your continued sexual abuses to me throughout my childhood,” she wrote. “According to my memories and my childhood diaries, you are nothing but a child molester and a sadist.”

In other words, this left-wing icon threated to destroy her own brother if he dared to tell the truth about her life. 

The CBC story that finally revealed the truth about St. Marie was published about 16 months ago and last week Canada finally decided to take back one of its highest civilian honors which it had bestowed upon her.

Singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie’s appointment to the Order of Canada has been terminated by the Governor General.

The government’s official publication, posted Friday, said Governor General Mary Simon had ended the appointment on Jan. 3, and was signed by the Secretary General of the Order of Canada…

Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous culture was a central part of her identity as she rose to fame in the 1960s, and she was won awards including multiple Junos and the Polaris Music Prize in 2015.

The Juno Awards are Canada’s equivalent of the Grammys and they are still mulling what to do about her lifetime of lies.

Leaders at the Juno Awards say they’ve yet to decide the fate of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s many honours with the music organization, days after it was confirmed she was stripped of her Order of Canada.

The Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences says it continues to consult with its Indigenous music advisory committee and other Indigenous stakeholders on how to “best proceed” with Sainte-Marie’s honours.

Junos organizers first said they would look into how to handle her five Juno wins in 2023, after a CBC report questioned Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous heritage, saying it found a birth certificate that indicated she was born in 1941 in Massachusetts.

As for St. Marie herself, her response to the initial allegations about her birth certificate sounds a lot like the sort of stuff trans people say about their own gender and birth certificates, i.e. I was assigned female at birth.

“Being an ‘Indian’ has little to do with sperm tracking and colonial record keeping: it has to do with community, culture, knowledge, teachings, who claims you, who you love, who loves you and who’s your family,” Sainte-Marie, 82, said in a written statement to The Canadian Press…

…she said it was common for birth certificates to be “created” after Indigenous children were adopted or taken away from their families.

So, yes, maybe she was assigned American and white at birth in Massachusetts, but in her mind she’s an indigenous Canadian and always has been. I’m a bit surprised Canada isn’t going along with it.