Buffy Sainte-Marie’s claims to Indigenous ancestry are being contradicted by members of the iconic singer-songwriter’s own family and an extensive CBC investigation.

By Geoff Leo, Roxanna Woloshyn and Linda Guerriero • CBC News

  • IninewCrowEnglish
    273·
    8 months ago

    Fucking hell … That pisses me off to no end

    This world is fucked and these fucking white assholes are fucked.

    I’m full blooded indigenous born and raised with my family in the north … my first language is Ojibwe-Cree, I spoke it with my family for the first ten years of my life … and all I’ve ever felt was shame for who I was and where I was born

    To hear these revelations about people like Joseph Boyden, judge Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond and professor Carrie Bourassa. … And now Buffy St Marie … I fucking looked up to Buffy, most of indigenous Canada grew up with her.

    One of the messed up parts of this story to me is I know and I am friends with lots of Mohawks from Six Nations and I heard many stories from their families about discrimination in southern Ontario. They had second world war veterans who couldn’t even find work because they were Indian so the only way they could get around that was to pass themselves off as ITALIAN!

    It’s twisted … Indians were passing themselves off as Italian to avoid being identified as Indian to make a basic living… and at the same time an Italian was passing herself off as Indian and making a fortune.

    It makes me feel sick to my core.

    That fucking bitch… What a wicked evil person it is to think it’s acceptable to take on the identity of an oppressed people and live off their misery and misfortune.

    Fuck you Buffy

    Or should I say fuck you Beverly Jean Santamaria

    • m0darn
      122·
      8 months ago

      It really saddens me to hear that you feel/felt that way about your identity/origins. I value the existence of you and your culture.

      My thoughts:

      As a settler Canadian I’ve been told blood quantum is a racist colonial concept, and what really makes a person indigenous is if they are embraced as a member of a first nation community.

      So my initial reaction (ie to the revelation she has european roots) was:

      It’s a person’s life that makes them indigenous, not their genes. It doesn’t really matter if she was born off reserve to settler parents, if she’s a member of a first nation.

      The article talks about how 1962 when she was in her twenties she asked a Cree family to give her an ‘Indian Name’, and adopt her into their family. She says they did.

      BUT It seems likely to me that she (fraudulently) presented herself to the Cree family as a ‘scoop’ victim to receive a sympathy name.

      And then:

      In the space of those 10 months [1962-1963], she was referred to as Algonquin, full-blooded Algonquin, Mi’kmaq, half-Mi’kmaq and Cree.

      So clearly the naming/adoption didn’t start as anything serious.

      It seems to me she received the sympathy naming, then over the course of years wormed her way into the family. Actually it’s pretty grotesque because the family had had a daughter Buffy’s age taken from them so this was like extreme manipulation of the vulnerable.

      All this is to say: Buffy didn’t grow up facing the challenges of an indigenous child. Her purported accession to the Cree nation was likely based on fraud and grotesque emotional manipulation.

      She has received so much of what was reserved for people that had to overcome real, actual oppression/prejudice and state abuse and trauma. Is this the biggest case of cultural appropriation in history?