This is where the murkiness enters as her Saskatchewan adopted aboriginal family isn’t distancing themselves from her, actually quite the opposite.
Indigenous icon Buffy Sainte-Marie's identity was brought into question by a CBC investigation, her Piapot family says the accusations are "ignorant, colonial -- and racist."
globalnews.ca
“Ntawnis Piapot, speaking for the family, says the bombshell claim that Sainte-Marie has no Indigenous blood has no bearing on her belonging to the Cree family.
Piapot is the great-granddaughter of Emile Piapot and Clara Starblanket, both deceased, who adopted Sainte-Marie some six decades ago.
Piapot says Sainte-Marie connected with the Piapot First Nation after she met her grandfather at a powwow in Ontario.
“There was just things that kind of lined up to her story too,” she told Global News.
“My grandparents had 10 children and some of them died because of the Indian Act system, because they couldn’t get proper health care on the reserve and so she was at that age where one of their children passed away and they kind of connected on that.
The adoption process, it took years — it took days and months and years of getting to know each other and trusting each other and going to ceremony and getting her Indian name (from my mushum) to finally look at her and be like, I acknowledge you as my daughter, you’re officially part of our family.”.
It was done in Cree custom and while Sainte-Marie didn’t claimed proof of blood relations, she is accepted as kin because of that ceremony.
“It’s really insulting that someone would question my great grandfather’s choice and right to adopt Buffy as his daughter,” Piapot said.…”
I’m not directing this at you, but at the response: That’s not the issue. No one is questioning the Piapot’s choice to accept her as an adult. They and Buffy are diverting the topic.
It’s her origin story that is completely false. The Fifth Estate program is a must watch if anyone wants to understand the controversy.
They showed in her own words that:
-Buffy has repeatedly said she was part of the Sixties Scoop, taken as an infant from a Canadian reserve and adopted out to a family in the US.
-she said her FN birth mother died. She has told several different versions of how and when she died.
-in various interviews she claimed to have come from different tribes in vastly different parts of Canada.
-that her birth certificate was destroyed in a fire, she didn’t know her birth date.
-she grew up knowing she was FN and felt ostracized and felt prejudice being in such a white community.
Then they proved:
-she was born in Massachusetts to her biological parents that raised her. She is part English and Italian, zero percent FN.
-The Sixties Scoop started about ten years after her birth, and had nothing to do with her.
-she not only has her birth certificate, she used it and provided a copy of it when she got married. It clearly states her place of birth as Massachusetts and her birth parents’ names. She is described as white on all official documents.
-she grew up in a nice Italian-American home that even now she describes as loving. They never understood why she was perpetuating a false narrative, but felt powerless to stop her. They were hurt by it because they felt abandoned.
-When she started doing press, her Massachusetts family contacted them to say that her claims about being FN and taken from a reserve were completely false. In response she threatened them with a defamation lawsuit and told her brother that if he spoke up she’d claim that he was a pedophile—something completely unsubstantiated. He was an Air Force and then a commercial pilot who was respected and close to her until that point.
That is just the tip of the iceberg from the show. They did extensive research and they played many different clips of Buffy describing her untrue origin story and it’s different each time. She didn’t claim to be FN until her early 20s when she was starting out as a singer. It became a big part of her act and she billed herself as an ‘Indian’ singer.
She had claimed at one point that her imaginary FN mother was from the Piapot FN and visited them when she had gained some fame. One childless couple ‘adopted’ her as an adult. She continued telling her story of how she was adopted out and then back into the Piapot FN until very recently where she said she was only adopted *in*.
The awards and incentives she received were set aside for Indigenous people, so she took what wasn’t hers. She has done great advocacy work for Indigenous people, but at the same time has talked about the ‘trauma’ she herself experienced from the white community.
