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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28222 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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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:

Her father Albert's parents were born in Italy while her mother Winifred was of English ancestry. Her family changed their surname from Santamaria to Sainte-Marie due to "anti-Italian sentiment" following the Second World War. Though "visibly white", her mother, Winifred, "self-identified as part Mi'kmaq."

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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