Buffy Sainte-Marie’s claims to Indigenous ancestry are being contradicted by members of the iconic singer-songwriter’s own family and an extensive CBC investigation.

By Geoff Leo, Roxanna Woloshyn and Linda Guerriero • CBC News

    • jadero@lemmy.ca
      8·
      1 year ago

      Did you miss the part where they’ve found a birth certificate showing that she was not born on any reservation.

      She also made official reference to her birthplace as part of getting married in 1982, just to seal the deal.

    • m0darn@lemmy.ca
      7·
      1 year ago

      She was born on the Piapiat reservation

      Uh, no, she wasn’t. She was born in Maine to white parents.

      She may have joined the Cree nation but it seems likely it was under false pretenses.

      I’m sure that she has done a lot for indigenous people and deserves some accolades but if she accepted money or awards that was meant for people that faced prejudice and oppression that’s wildly inappropriate.

    • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      As a full blooded indigenous person the news about this completely sucks

      The message is …

      • being full blooded means nothing
      • being successful and having money means you can say do and become whatever you want to be

      This revelation doesn’t say that much about Santamaria … it says so much about how everyone doesn’t really care about full or mostly blooded native individuals.

      • MacroCyclo@lemmy.ca
        1·
        1 year ago

        Kinda curious, why should anyone care how much “indigenous blood” you have. Shouldn’t your personal circumstance, history, and culture be a more important focus than your genetics?

      • Yaztromo@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        I think the fact this is coming out now and is being discussed so much means that a lot of people really care about full/mostly-full blooded native individuals, and that they feel this sort of misrepresentation of heritage is wrong and harmful.

        The fact it’s taken 60 years to get to this point says something sad about how much people cared about this in the past — but I’d like to think the attention this story is getting means this is changing for the better, and that most settler Canadians don’t agree that people should be allowed to misrepresent their heritage to the ultimate detriment of the First Nations people of this country.