Within the past few weeks, Buffy Sainte-Marie's biography on her official website has been altered to remove claims that she is a Cree woman from the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan.
Buffy Sainte-Marie's claims of Cree ancestry and birth on Sask. First Nation removed from her website | CBC News Loaded
According to the Wayback Machine, a digital archive of web pages, as recently as Nov. 7, Sainte-Marie's biography on her website twice described her as a "Cree singer-songwriter." It also said she "is believed to have been born in 1941 on the Piapot First Nation reserve in Saskatchewan and taken from her biological parents when she was an infant.
"For the longest time, me as an individual was very proud of the fact that the only Indigenous person to win an Oscar, it was Buffy Sainte-Marie and she's from where we were from," he said. "We believed in that and had no reason to doubt that." Sainte-Marie reiterated her claim that she has "never lied" about her identity and called CBC's investigation a "reckless and ignorant" attack on her character that "weaponized" her estranged family and the abuse she suffered as a child.
In 1989, the Toronto Star ran this image of Sainte-Marie, left, arriving at a party with Delia Opekokew, one of the singer's lawyers and a friend. In the affidavit, Opekokew said in the 1970s and 1980s, people on the Piapot First Nation told her that Sainte-Marie's Piapot mother voluntarily gave her daughter up for adoption.
Good said it's "ridiculous" to believe this Massachusetts-based couple would have travelled all the way to Saskatchewan in the early 1940s. "That Indigenous woman didn't exist in isolation," said Good. "Buffy would have been able to track down her family simply through oral tradition." CBC reached out to Ntawnis and Debra Piapot, spokespeople for the family who adopted Sainte-Marie in the 1960s, to ask for their comments regarding this story. They haven't replied.In her recent public statement, Sainte-Marie said this community acceptance makes her Indigenous.
Lavallee told CBC that the controversy about Sainte-Marie has caused him and others in the community to do some soul-searching. He said it's wrong for someone who doesn't share that history to claim biological connection to his community. "Similarly, when considered for any awards or recognition in Canada, her representatives have been proactive in sharing this information," the email said.
In that letter, Opekokew said the simplest way for Sainte-Marie to become a Canadian was through a Canadian birth certificate. But she said that after more than two years of searching, she had concluded the hunt was futile. After CBC published its investigation, Sainte-Marie released a public statement saying she has had her birth certificate for years.
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