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Canada's most famous indigenous woman: not indigenous, not even Canadian
Buffy Ste-Marie is a musician. She has a deep discography of folk music that incorporates her indigenous identity and activism. She has lived a long and productive life as arguably the most famous Canadian indigenous woman. For Americans she's probably better known as the first woman to breastfeed on television, an interesting milestone in its own right. It's also good that this proves she's a woman, as it's the only element of her public identity that is still standing. In news that should shock exactly zero people who are tangentially aware of the notion of "Pretendians" in Canadian high society, the CBC has rather convincing evidence that Buffy Ste-Marie's version of her life's history is fraudulent.
The details have changed over the years - a sign in itself, if anyone would have risked official censure to point it out - but in general Ste-Marie has claimed herself to have been born to a Piapot Cree woman, and then subsequently removed from her birth mother (either because of her death, or forcibly as part of the "Sixties Scoop", which should have itself been a red flag considering she was born in 1941). She claimed to have been adopted by an American family, and later reconnected with and adopted by her birth people in Canada. Well, the documentary evidence seems fairly irrefutable: her "adoptive" parents were her birth parents. Her siblings are her full-siblings. She was born Beverly Santamaria in Massachusetts, and has no ancestral connection to Canada at all. Her father was Italian, her mother English.
She appears to have begun claiming Indian ancestry in her early 20s, first claiming to be Mi'kmaq, a perhaps more believable white lie having grown up in New England. Alternatively, she said she was Algonqiun. A few years later she claimed she was Cree, which prompted her paternal uncle to correct a local newspaper on that fact in 1964. In the next few decades as her career began to take off, coinciding with a general surge of interest in Native American arts and culture, she increasingly resorted to legal threats to silence her family members from contradicting her self-constructed origin story, including threatening her brother that she would tell the world that he had sexually abused her.
I've been watching the trickle of responses over the past day on reddit as news this piece was coming out spread. This thread on /r/indiancountry is generally defensive, arguing that irrespective of the exact circumstances of her birth that she is legitimately indigenous via ceremonial adoption in her 20s. I think these kind of arguments will melt away now that the CBC investigation has been published. It seems clear to me that Ste-Marie's story was not borne of confusion or innocent mistake, but was rather a deliberately and cynically constructed narrative that was upheld through threats and intimidation. The investigation was much more thorough and dug into a lot more nasty stuff than I expected. Ste-Marie was a Canadian legend, and had been endlessly fêted by the CBC (and other Canadian media) prior to this. I would point out that although the CBC has generally gone mushy progressive, its investigative journalism programs, namely Marketplace and The Fifth Estate (who undertook this project) have remained excellent and provide very good value for taxpayer money.
Yep, they largely have melted away. There's still a large number of "say it ain't so" folks, but the evidence seems pretty solid. When I did oil and gas law I had to look at a lot of genealogical research and vital records and there's no real question of the circumstances of her birth. If she were adopted and a birth certificate issued, the date of issue wouldn't be the day after she was born and it certainly wouldn't be in-sequence with other birth certificates whose veracity no one is doubting. Questioning the validity of these records has about as much going for it as questioning the validity of Obama's birth certificate.
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The evidence seems pretty solid, and I'm sure something hinky is going on.
That said, she looks very indigenous. Of course every race actually spans a wide variety of phenotypes, but she is pretty much the exemplar of the Native American one. Only DNA would say for sure, but until that point I would bet that she's not a pretendian, at least with respect to being of indigenous descent.
I think you're underestimating how much one can do with makeup. Among my siblings, me and my younger sister have brown hair, brown eyes, darker complexions, and at least with my sister I've seen her very convincingly go "mock Indian" with the right makeup/style/accessories (we're like around 5% Métis or whatever; multiple full-blood indigenous relatives from the early 19th century, by all accounts more than Ms Ste-Marie).
My older sisters are both fair, blonde, blue-eyed and would not pass muster as indigenous even though we all have the same parents and otherwise resemble each other strongly. Similarly Ste-Marie looks very much like her (fairer) brother
I feel like it's also a matter of accessories and context as well, for people of a kind of light-medium brown that could plausibly be from anywhere between Mediterreanean, most of the Arab world, most of Latin America etc.
If I see somebody who's about the right shade of brown dressed in an outfit that suggests an ethnicity, I'm generally not gonna fetch out the calipers and take them at face value
At least in terms of facial features, she looks like a lot of people in central Adriatic Italy or Albania.
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I was highly surprised by this, and looking up Wikipedia it says there that her mother claimed to have Mi'kmaq ancestry, so maybe it started off as the same kind of Elizabeth Warren "my family history says we have Native ancestry" notion, but since there was that surge of interest in Native American issues in the 60s/70s, she found it a better idea to claim more ancestry than she had, and by shifting it to Canada rather than New England, make it harder for the US side to trace where exactly she supposedly came from:
Maybe. Who knows? Certainly if you wanted a career in folk music in the 50s/60s, having some claim to Latino or Indigenous or the like ethnicity was an advantage, and if you're a music promoter and a lassie with black hair and olive complexion walks into your office claiming to be Canadian Indigenous, are you going to call her a liar?
The interesting thing about Buffy is that although this was apparently her official bio/story very early on, she didn't really lean into it much until the early/mid seventies when she was already well established. She had the odd song on the sixties albums relating to Indian issues, but most of it was kind of standard hippie/folky stuff. Certainly the big hits written by her ('Lift us up' and 'Universal Soldier', off the top of my head) had no such themes. It's not like she burst on the scene in buckskins and moccasins; she just dresses like a regular hippy in most of the images I can gather, really until almost the 80s/90s.
ED: I'm actually more concerned how come she's LARPing as Canadian at all -- did she get citizenship based on the orphan claim, or what?
Perhaps this is not "really" leaning into it, but here's an early TV appearance:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=KwOyconXiGM
(Incidentally, that's a terrible song. I listened to several of her songs and the melody was awful in just about all of them. I usually enjoy 1960s/early 1970s folk or folky hippie music, but the combination of intense sincerity and awkward melody made me suspect that I have a very filtered knowledge of that period's progressive folk music.)
Universal Soldier works, but even then it's a bit stilted in terms of pure musicality
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Interesting, this is not one that I had on my bingo card.
I guess the possibility of extramarital relations on the part of her mother is not addressed -- this seems similarly plausible with Turpell-Lafonde as something which one might know but not want to publicize, leading to the fun web of lies for journalists to dig into. (and not contradicted by the birth certificate)
She certainly looks very indian in all the pictures from cradle to (near) grave -- much more so than anyone else in her family.
Iron Eyes Cody was born Espera Oscar de Corti, confusing Italian blood for Native is not unusual.
Sure, and he looks about like DeNiro or Alan Alda (nee Abruzzo) when you get him out of the Indian drag: https://oldshowbiz.tumblr.com/post/187609018569/iron-eyes-cody-and-rodd-redwing-were-a-pair-of
I'm not saying that an Italian can't fool Americans who have never seen an Indian into thinking they're an Indian -- I'm saying that I grew up around little Indian girls who looked just like her in her toddler pictures; their moms looked just like her on her album covers, and now she looks just like their grandmas.
She didn't even start wearing Indian stuff on her album covers until some time in the seventies; I'm not saying I couldn't be wrong, but 'long hair, some feathers and a tan' are what I'm talking about at all.
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Her father was Italian, so depending where her paternal grandparents came from (e.g. Sicily which has been colonised by Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians, then much later by Arabs, in between bouts of Western Europeans invading), she could be very dark-skinned and 'foreign' looking for someone born in New England.
She could, but that's not what I mean -- I grew up around lots of (Western) Canadian Indians, and she looks a lot like them through the years. More facial structure than complexion.
If she could prove recent native ancestry via DNA test (anything more than 10%, even), she obviously would, that would be a slam dunk.
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Yeah, when you say "a lassie with black hair and olive complexion" you could easily be describing my half-Italian (part Sicilian) sister. But I'd be the guy to look at such a person and tell them they looked more like they were from New Jersey than the First Nations, which is probably one of the reasons I'd make a lousy music promoter.
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I seem to recall that this was the defense of Shaun King (I think? Some BLM activist) who was accused of Dolezal-ing. This seems like the perfect response to any accusations like this. The people who want to believe have a possible - perhaps even plausible - narrative they can latch onto, giving you the support you might need for facing the accusations. And the people accusing you have almost no recourse to actually verify your claims. DNA tests aren't common, and the father might be long gone anyway, and DNA tests are fallible too.
King probably is ‘biracial’ in the sense that I think he clearly has some black ancestry, even though he’s obviously mostly of European descent.
In the case of alleged ‘pretendians’, DNA tests are an easy way of refuting allegations.
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Very likely in this case -- I think Buffy's in her 80s!
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Very interesting that reddit native americans are so hostile toward 'pretendian hunters' as a perceived attack on the sovereign right of each tribe to decide who counts as a member.
The nature of federal and state funding for Indians as determined by tribe as determined (in many cases) by blood as a kind of reparations (explicitly or implicitly) means that 'conversion' to the Indian way of life is complicated, but I wonder what percentage of Indians who live on the reservation would be in favor of a formal conversion process for whites and others who want to become natives. What do they think such a thing would or should entail? Living on the res and making enough of a contribution to be recognized as such by some local community official?
A gift-giving, paternal relationship between European/American settler states and native states is a lot older than any sense of white guilt. The US government, for example, has been making at least periodic payments to Indian tribes since the 1790s.
I don't know if I'd call it reparations. This is a traditional form of interaction between the new states and the tribes, including between states and tribes that otherwise had no real relationship.
Sure, but it’s been a century since Indians were confirmed to be US citizens, subject to the general rights and responsibilities of the settler American society in which they now live, and at whose mercy they had been for a hundred years before 1924.
In Canada it might be a little different due to the complex nature of confederation and crown-native relations.
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I don't know about Canada, but in the States there's often a financial question involved (casino royalties or whatever). I used to live near a rez and would occasionally overhear stories of tribal political squabbles when someone had a few too many beers. This lady over here gets her second cousin on the tribal rolls for a scholarship, this guy over here gets 30 people who've lived on the rez their whole life purged from the rolls because everyone gets an extra 30 cents a month or something trivial. Shit gets stupid.
I would think that should make people more likely to support pretendians not less. If you’re a minority ethnic group that gets money from the government, having fakes out there means less money. Even if you don’t, having more people convert is problematic simply because of a sort of quality control issue (for want of a better term) in which the people “converting” might have very little in common with the natives and know little about their beliefs or culture. They’d also have little interest in preserving or passing along that culture. Basically, it ends up being diluted and becomes a LARP by brown looking white people pretending to be natives and doing a terrible job at it while actual tribes struggle to teach their kids what being tribal is actually all about.
Reddit Native Americans may be disproportionately LARPers. There are relatively few Native Americans in the US/Canada compared to whites, and plenty of white people who would rather be Native American than white; whether the latter group is more common on Reddit is hard to know, but possible.
Actual native Americans I’ve met seem disproportionately not the uh, Reddit inclined set. But that could just be my filter bubble.
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Yeah, this would be very interesting to see pan out. Amerinds have higher in group loyalty than generic whites so it'll probably take a while but it would amuse me greatly to see an Indian (dot) become an Indian (feather) tribal chief. Probably will be more competent too at getting resources allocated for his tribe.
https://www.theonion.com/man-finally-put-in-charge-of-struggling-feminist-moveme-1819569515
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