The Pretendians, Part 2

Link to Part 1 here.

Today (September 30th) is la Journée de la vérité et de la réconciliation, or the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation. It honors the memory of thousands of Indigenous children who were taken from their families between 1867 and 1996 and sent to federally-run residential schools, where they were abused, neglected, and often died.

So it felt like an appropriate day to finally finish my blog post about Canada’s most famous pretendian Buffy Sainte-Marie and the damage done by Indigenous cultural theft.

I apologize for the delay. There’s a lot to sort through around pretendianism. It’s a very hot topic here, lots of stories in the media and new levels of scrutiny being brought to topics of identity, ethnicity, and Indigeneity, fomented by the Bourassa and Sainte-Marie scandals (among others). Many column inches are being devoted to puzzling out this problem, and I hope ultimately that will be a good thing.

I wish I could do a sufficiently deep dive into these issues. Dealing with questions about race, cultural sovereignty, and who has the authority to declare someone a “real” Indian (or anything else) requires more time and research than I can handle right now.

I’ve included a few additional links at the end of this post for those who want to delve more. With the rapid increase of race- and religion-based hate crimes and the rise of white-supremacist political power, we need to get educated and figure this shit out quick. We need to stop extremists from further abusing peoples who have already been pushed to the brink of extinction by genocide and cultural annihilation.

[taking a deep breath and narrowing the scope for everyone’s sanity]

Okay, let’s spill some tea about Buffy Sainte-Marie now, shall we?

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In 1941, the person now known as Buffy Sainte-Marie was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts to parents of Italian and English descent.

That’s what her official birth certificate says, anyway. But Buffy contends that her official birth certificate can’t be trusted, that it was generated after she was kidnapped from her Indigenous parents in Canada and adopted by those Massachusetts people of European descent.

Buffy’s family name at birth (according to the official certificate) was Santamaria, but due to anti-Italian sentiment after WWII, her parents decided to Frenchify the name to “Sainte-Marie.”

(…perhaps this is where Buffy first got the idea that one could simply assume a new cultural identity if the old one proved inconvenient?)

Stoneham, MA is a long way from the Piapot 75 Reserve in Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan where Buffy claims she was *really* born to Cree parents (although throughout her career, she would variously claim she was M’ikmaq, Algonguin, Piapot, or Métis).

She also insists that the birth certificate showing her non-Native origins was created after she was taken from her real parents in the Sixties Scoop and placed with her white family. It’s true that some states generate new birth certificates upon adoption, but the town clerk in Stoneham affirmed that the birth certificate on file there was an original documenting a live birth, and Sainte-Marie herself has affirmed Massachusetts as her birthplace on other official documents.

As Buffy’s fame grew and she became more insistent about being Indigenous, her U.S. family publicly disputed her adoption claims. So in the spirit of sisterly love and gratitude, Buffy threatened to sue them, additionally accusing her brother of sexual abuse.

The family, not wanting to end up in an expensive lawsuit, stopped making public statements about Buffy’s origins. However, at one point, her younger sister took a DNA test that she claimed showed she had negligible Indigenous DNA but was still related to Buffy’s son Cody, which would not have been possible if Buffy’s claims to genetic Indigeneity were true.

Buffy’s sister’s assertions are a little dodgy, but Buffy has not taken a DNA test to prove her claims despite being urged to do so by Native leaders who also believe her assertion of Indian heritage is false.

Buffy made her career singing about the suffering and the glory of Native people. She has a trilling, expressive voice and is a solid songwriter and composer, using Native chant and instruments in many of her works. She was not only famous–like, Sesame Street famous–but lauded for her activism on behalf of Canada’s First Nations peoples (in an oddly self-owning bit of deep cover, she set up a charity to encourage young Indigenous people to “speak their culture.”)

Like Iron Eyes Cody, she generously gave back to the Indian communities from which she co-opted her new and profitable cultural identity. Even after the revelations about her less-than-Indigenous roots, her support of Native communities made her shenanigans okay in many Native people’s eyes, while others felt exploited by this largesse, feeling it to be a sort of bribe for silence.

But now Buffy’s story of cultural identity gets complicated. Just as Pinocchio (who also had a lying problem) wished to be a real boy, Buffy’s wish to be adopted by a real Indian family finally came true….decades after she had already told the world she was born Indigenous, but no matter, to her eyes.

As an adult, Buffy was “adopted” by a Piapot family which made her, in Piapot culture, an Indian–full stop. The Piapot family claims that, in their culture, this kind of adoption is a known and accepted practice, and that their tribal sovereignty gives them the right to declare Buffy part of their family. They say that assertions to the contrary about Buffy are colonizing and subvert their authority, undermining their tribal ways which should not be questioned.

But a couple Indigenous academes had questions, questions like, “even if her adoption by the Piapot is a real thing, should people like Buffy be allowed to take up artistic and economic space where Indigenous people should be?”

This is literally a million-dollar question, and there are others raised by the Piapot adoption: who gets to determine cultural identity? What about legal identity? Is it okay to co-opt another culture if you give back somehow? Does recognition by an ethnic community change one’s ethnic identity?

Or, as with Rachel Dolezal: can a person anoint themselves into a new racial identity by holding themselves out to be a member of that race? Some people on TikTok think so.

Race is a relatively recent concept, created to facilitate slavery; it has no basis in DNA. Because race is a cultural concept, should we then modify our concept of race to allow self-identification with any race we like a lot? We have the right to declare our identity in other respects–we can choose our names, our sexuality, our religious and political affiliations, and so on. Why should race be any different?

These questions are too deeply philosophical and psychosocial to be explored here, and they will take years of intelligent analysis to sort out. Meanwhile, urgent issues like white shysters engaging in “race shifting” in order to divert millions from entitlement programs for people of color and the Indigenous need to be addressed immediately. Perhaps this isn’t the time to make it easier for government grifters to steal by loosening the definition of Indigeneity?

In light of the many problems caused by self-attested Indigenous status, maybe it would be better to form a standard of authenticity to protect Indian communities from race-shifters like Buffy Sainte-Marie et al.

Verifying Indigenous status isn’t simple, but it is important to help prevent abuse of programs meant to assist Indigenous people. Calling out pretendians is also important, not just to prevent fraud but as a sign of respect for Indigenous people and their history.

Now back to our Buffy story:

In 2021, when Buffy was 80 years old, Canada Post issued a postage stamp in her honor. The glowing description of Buffy includes Buffy’s claim that she was “probably” born Piapot First Nation.

But in October 2023, after decades of a vaunted career, Buffy was finally outed by the CBC as a pretendian of European ancestry, and this just as an award-winning documentary and a dazzling televised retrospective concert in her honor were being hyped all over North America.

Canada was shocked and stunned by the news; reactions ranged from fierce defense of Buffy The Indigenous National Treasure to outrage at her apparent lies and hijacking of Indian identity.

Buffy clapped back at the allegations, but her statements were weaksauce and seemed if anything to confirm her lies. Soon thereafter, Native activists demanded her awards and honors be rescinded, accusing Buffy of taking up spaces where verifiable Indigenous artists should have been working.

They have a point. For example, in 1983 Buffy was lauded as the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar (she wrote “Up Where We Belong” for “An Officer and a Gentleman”). So what about Lily Gladstone? Now that Buffy’s Native status has been debunked, isn’t Lily the first Native person to win an Oscar? Will her Oscar win for “Killers of the Flower Moon” earlier this year be forever asterisked because Buffy can’t confess to her lies?

When pretendian accomplishments are celebrated, the hard-won accomplishments of Native people are overshadowed and often erased entirely. Buffy has quietly removed parts of her website that allude to her being the first Native Oscar winner, but because she hasn’t been honest about being a pretendian, Lily Gladstone will never receive the full honors she is due.

But it doesn’t stop there. Buffy has won money and awards that might have gone to real Indigenous artists if she had not been in the mix.

Buffy says the pretendian allegations are hurtful to her, but it doesn’t seem to occur to her how much she is hurting others by doubling down on her claims of Native status and stealing not only their thunder but their gigs, money, and fame.

Since the CBC story broke almost a year ago, Buffy seems to have gone silent on the questions surrounding her birth, her work, and the biggest mystery: why?

Buffy, like Iron Eyes Cody, seems to have had a true love of Indian culture, but does loving something entitle you to take it? Did she believe her lies, or was this all a cynical gaslighting to feed her own ego and stardom?

TBH, I kinda get her point about her Piapot identity; Buffy’s story of being adopted into a Native family is not unlike legal adoption in the States. Someone claims to be your parent and upon approval by the sovereign government, you get a new birth certificate and a new name, with that person’s name as your legal parent. There are reasonable arguments for that part of her story.

However, there’s nothing reasonable about her years of conveniently shifting narratives, nor is there anything reasonable about allowing her to get away with her longtime deception.

I understand she has a stake in remaining a true believer in her own fabricated origin story. That said, I have no sympathy for someone who steals the valor of others and refuses to face the music, as it were, when they get busted.

I’m glad she got caught. I hope one day she does the right thing by the Indigenous people she supposedly admired (she only admired them as long as they served her interests, I guess). Buffy Sainte-Marie has tainted her own legacy with her silence and lack of remorse, and maybe that’s the most fitting punishment for her crimes.

She owes all Native people some truth and a lot of reconciliation.

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ADDITIONAL LINKS

The Carrie Bourassa scandal revealed pretendians in upper education, and she wasn’t the only academic bolstering a career by claiming to be something they’re not. It has become a significant enough problem that universities are investigating new strategies for preventing the diversion of jobs and grants to non-Natives.

Adopting a new race? All the kids are doing it! TikTok is popularizing the practice of RCTA (“Race Change To Another“). Some young people are even having surgery to ethnically resemble their favorite anime characters. Are you down? Staying a boring race is so Ohio.

If you’re interested in more stories about pretendianism, Sylvain pointed me towards this podcast from Canadaland.com.

Another podcast from CBC about how pretendians damage Indigenous communities.

CBC’s “The Fifth Estate” documentary on the allegations of identity theft against Buffy Sainte-Marie.