The Fifth Estate’s exposé of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s real identity as an Italian- and English-American from suburban Massachusetts rather than an indigenous person abducted from a Saskatchewan reservation rates awards in the same way Buffy Sainte-Marie did not.
That is to say, people who lie about their background to curry favor with panels, committees, and judges, who in turn lie about honoring talent when they really award politics or race or gender identity, do not deserve their accolades, and the people who expose frauds rate praise but never receive it.
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The Washington Post in 1978 characterized the 1960s Buffy-Sainte-Marie as “a protest singer, a ‘Movement’ figure, a musical force spoken of in the same breath with Dylan and Ochs and Baez.” But she traveled down whatever path led to attention. The singer-songwriter charted with her 1972 thumping rock cover of country song “Mister Can’t You See” and enjoyed her greatest success a decade later as a co-writer of the schmaltzy “Up Where We Belong.” Elsewhere, Sainte-Marie parlayed phony heritage claims into the Order of Canada, onto a spot next to Gordon and Maria on Sesame Street, and upon a Great White North postage stamp.
The CBC documentary finds old articles describing Sainte-Marie as Algonquin and Mi’kmaq before she settled on Cree Indian.
“Am I understanding this right, her name is Buffy Sainte-Marie now?” Stoneham, Massachusetts, town clerk Maria Sagarino explains while producing the birth certificate of Beverly Santamaria. “And she’s a folk singer, and she says she was born in Canada and that these people adopted her? Okay, yeah. Not true.”
Her story of the state placing her for adoption in the Sixties Scoop that witnessed the Canadian government taking indigenous children from their indigent parents falls upon the inconvenient chronology of her birth occurring more than a decade prior to the start of this misguided effort.
She provided conflicting accounts at various points about whether she knew her birth parents.
“These stories just multiple, multiple stories that can’t all live together, they can’t coexist,” Jean Teillet explained to the CBC. “Like, ‘I knew my parents,’ ‘I never knew my parents’ — that’s two things that can’t live together.”
An uncle wrote to newspapers early in her career correcting her con. When her airline-pilot brother spilled the beans after a chance encounter with Sainte-Marie and her PBS colleagues deboarding a plane, Sainte-Marie threatened him with a lawsuit and wrote him, “According to my memories and my diaries, you are nothing but a child molester and a sadist.”
The family reasoned that she was too far gone morally at that point and gave up correcting a record that PBS and the rest of mass media did not seem eager to correct. Relatives — white people from Massachusetts — appeared befuddled in the documentary at her six-decade charade.
“Talking to Big Bird and other characters,” she maintained during the 1970s, “I can prove to children that the Indians aren’t all dead, or that they’re all the same.”
Indeed, some, such as Ward Churchill, Elizabeth Warren, and Sacheen Littlefeather, show that some Native Americans differ as much from Native Americans as Europeans do from them. Professor Kim TallBear of the University of Alberta wondered in the documentary if 20 to 25 percent benefitting from checking the Native American box do so falsely. (READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn: No Hollywood Ending for Fake Indian Sacheen Littlefeather)
At least Sainte-Marie looked the part. On her Moonshot album cover, perhaps through makeup, the tanning bed, trick photography, or some other affectation, she really, really looks the part — so Indian that she’s almost Near Eastern Indian. She fooled a lot of people but not, one suspects, herself.
Buffy Sainte-Marie responded to the CBC’s revelations with a tables-turning rebuttal titled, “My Truth as I Know It.” That peculiar phrase, “my truth” — uttered by Rigoberta Menchú and others caught in the traps they laid themselves — suggests a personalized, à la carte reality created by individuals rather than something less flexible and more objective. So, what started as a little lie ends up as an indictment upon whether truth exists beyond a matter of perspective or even wish.
Her 1978 song “Disco Powwow” arrived, in detective parlance, as a clue. But it took another 45 years for Buffy Sainte-Marie’s inauthenticity to finally undermine her standing among the beautiful people.
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