Saint-Marie has been a folk music icon and Indigenous success story in Canada since she found fame in the 1970s. She has always described herself as belonging to the Cree tribe, and says she was adopted as a child by a white family as part of the infamous Sixties Scoop, when Indigenous children in Canada were removed from their families and adopted by white parents. ut now, members of her family are claiming to CBC that she is lying. CBC also claims to have unearthed a birth certificate that says her roots begin in Massachusetts.
The full story - and it's pretty fuckin' funny - is here:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12757271/Buffy-Saint-Marie
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12757271/Buffy-Saint-Marie
...
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There are a number of new items in her shop. Click here to see them all:
Elizabeth Warren was unavailable for comment.
ReplyDeleteMA is getting famous for indian fakirs
ReplyDeletesdas
ReplyDeleteSo how is Buffy related to Elizabeth Warren? Are they first cousins?
ReplyDeleteAnother cultural appropriation story I don't care about.
ReplyDeleteUnlike Fauxcahontas Warren, Buffy Sainte-Marie has lived as an adoptive member of the Cree nation, whether she was born in it or not. She looks Cree, sounds Cree, and has *been* Cree for at least fifty of her years.
ReplyDeleteThere was some discomfort around being biracial even when people had stable families, back then, which she didn't have. I came along later but still remember being told that it wasn't "nice" to notice that Dad looked "Indian" and anyway he couldn't be a "real Indian" because he had grey eyes. As if cross-marriage hadn't happened, indeed been required for some years in the past in my part of the world. Only in the 1970s did glamourpusses like Cher and Anita Bryant admit that they got their looks from being biracial, which made it much easier to accept that I got mine the same way. It was not a traumatic experience. By then we all knew that people are people and the important thing about my ancestors was that they stayed together and built a strong family.
Which Buffy's, by all accounts, did not. Nevertheless, she persisted in being a beautiful, successful singer who's had a fabulous career. If she rejected some or all of her ancestors, she was at least consistently loyal to others.
Very different from merely exploiting some tenuous claim to remote, unknown ancestors one turns out not actually to have, *for gain*, with no attempt ever to give anything back to the real descendants of those alleged ancestors.
Some of us just have to admit it. "Sainte Marie" is a French name. She's not very French. I have an Irish genetic trait. I don't look Irish. Ethnic groups crossbreed. Buffy's always admitted being partly White. I've always identified as White and admitted being partly Cherokee.