Front Burner - Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous ancestry challenged

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

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 from The Fifth Estate, making her the latest high-profile public figure whose ancestry story has been contradicted by genealogical documentation, historical research and personal accounts. Geoff Leo is a senior Investigative Reporter with CBC Saskatchewan. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

Happy Holidays! I'm Frank Cappadocia, Dean of Continuous Professional Learning at Humber Polytechnic. I'd like you to set a goal to drive key learning for your people in 2025. I want you to connect with Humber CPL to design a custom training solution that accelerates your team's performance and engagement. Humber works with you to hone industry-specific upskilling, enhance your leadership, and drive results. Flexible learning delivery formats are tailored to your unique needs. Adapt, evolve, and excel. To learn more, go to humber.ca slash cpl. This is a CBC podcast. This is Cree Indian. Cree Indians are my tribe. And we live in Canada. I'm just coming down from visiting my folks in Cree reservation in Canada. Oh yeah? Who knows? A reservation? Are you Indian? Yeah. Hi, I'm visiting my folks in Queen Reservation in Canada. Oh, yeah? Lord knows. A reservation. Are you Indian?

Mm-hmm. Hi, I'm Damon Fairless. My sister read me a story about Indians. Was it a real story about Indians or was it a fairy tale? It was a real one. It was a real one. Some of them are fairy tales and some of them are real. Some are just pretend and some are real.

Yeah. I'm real. Some are fairy tales and some of them are real. Some are just pretend and some are real. I'm real. Buffy St. Marie making history on Sesame Street in 1975. Since arriving on the folk scene in the 60s, the beloved singer-songwriter has been celebrated for her music and as a champion for Indigenous people, culture, and rights.

If there's one single thing I'm trying to do for the Indians as a composer, it's to inform the white community and explain the way things really were, because I think that it's about time that we start to raise a generation of Canadian kids and American kids who realize that nations like individuals make mistakes, and that mistakes must be corrected if proper and straight growth is ever to be resumed. But now, her identity as an Indigenous person is in doubt. I remember those stories growing up that, don't talk about it, we don't want any trouble. So she was white.

I don't understand how in the face of all of those details, you continue to tell a story that has no basis in reality. I don't get it. Jeff Leo is a senior investigative reporter with CBC Saskatchewan. The past couple of years, he's been investigating people who falsely pass themselves off as Indigenous. And today he's here to explain what he's uncovered about Buffy St. Marie for an explosive new episode of The Fifth Estate. Hey, Jeff, thanks for being here.

Yeah, happy to do it. So Buffy St. Marie is arguably the most famous person to have their claims of indigenous ancestry questioned. But for people who don't know, who aren't familiar with her, why is she so famous? Why is she so revered? Yeah, well, she's 82 now and she's had a 60-year career, a career that dates back to the early 60s, just kind of at the start of the hippie movement. She just retired from public performances just a few months ago. So she got her start in Greenwich Village as a folk artist, you know, hanging around people like you might have heard of, like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell.

In fact, she actually helped Joni Mitchell launch her career. And famous for a lot of famous songs she's written, perhaps one of the biggest, Universal Soldier, which became the unofficial anthem of the anti-Vietnam War protesters. She's had songs covered by people you might have heard of, like Elvis and Barbra Streisand. Yeah, it's amazing the many people she's been connected with over the years. And then, of course, she was a regular on Sesame Street and teaching children, millions of them, about Indigenous culture and language. What is that? An Indian shoe.

An Indian shoe. Do you know what it's called? It's called a moccasin. That's right. So the Indians all over the country, some living in the city, some doing things that we've done for, you know, generations that our grandparents taught us how to do and our parents do. And then we do all kinds of other things that everybody does, like come to Sesame Street and travel around. And she's been a very powerful advocate and spokesperson for Indigenous rights, talking about residential schools, harms of colonialism. And she's launched programs that fund education about Indigenous people as well. Yeah, and she has a lot of hardware, right, in terms of accolades and awards.

She has lots of Junos, lots of awards specifically for Indigenous artists, even a few honoring her lifetime achievement as an Indigenous musician. The biggest piece of hardware, the most famous piece of hardware she collected, was an Oscar. Accepting the original song award for Up Where We Belong, Jack Nietzsche, Buffy St. Marie, and Will Jennings. She's considered the first indigenous person to have won an Oscar for her role in writing the song

Up Where We Belong from the movie. Officer and the Gentleman. There it is. That's right. So you talk about her coming up in that like incredible period in Greenwich Village, the folk scene. Is there a sense that Buffy's career benefited from the social movements at the time? Yeah.

You know, this was, yeah, this was interesting for me to really see how much the hippie movement sort of idolized the indigenous culture at the time, indigenous spirituality, that was a big part of the hippie culture. And it was obvious from her early career that this also influenced her own view of the world. You can hear it in her music. She wrote a song now that the buffalo is gone. It's a song that laments the way that a colonial system has affected indigenous people, has pushed them down. And so, you know, the focus of her career was definitely noticed by the larger culture at the time because what she was doing was so different. Yeah. So distinctive. She had this distinctive look, style, and she really stood out from others

who were doing folk music at the time. So that's the Buffy St. Marie that most of us know, but let's start unraveling her ancestry claims. What's the story Buffy tells us about her origins? Yeah. So I think if you were to boil down the basic story, because there are sort of variations as we go, but if you were to boil down the basic story, she claimed to be Cree, that she was born on the Piapot First Nation near Regina in the early 1940s. And then a Massachusetts couple adopted her, a couple by the name of Albert and Winifred Santa Maria or Saint Marie, adopted her as a baby and raised her near Boston. Well, I was raised in a very small town.

There was only one Indian family there and it wasn't mine. I had all kinds of self-identity questions that little kids don't label as self-identity problems at all, but I had them looking back on it. And then the story goes that later in life, in her early twenties, she was reunited with her Piapod relatives and actually adopted back into the community. Okay.

And I want to come back to that in a bit, but I want to go into what you get into in your piece, which is you start talking with Buffy's extended family. This is the folks in the States and Massachusetts. Yeah. They've got a totally different story. So let's start with Buffy's niece, Heidi. What did Heidi tell you?

Yeah. So she was the first family member I talked to. So Heidi is in her fifties. So she's quite a bit younger than Buffy, but she told me that from the conversations about Buffy as her career was taking off in the family, she's a very famous relative, none of the family that she heard believed she was Indigenous. They didn't buy the story at all. Buffy was not adopted. She was a child of my grandfathers and my grandmothers. You know, I don't know how or when she started to create her story, but at this point, she's just raised in a Caucasian family.

I took a look at the family tree of the Santa Maria, the St. Marie's, and you can see that on the one side, it's Italian ancestry. On the other side, it's English ancestry. And Heidi says, you know, all of the family that she knew, they were shocked that she was making these claims to have Cree ancestry, be born on a First Nation in Canada. You also spoke with Buffy's cousin, Bruce, and I guess he said the family was really stoked for her success. They were really happy she was doing well. They would cut out all the newspaper clippings and save them. And, you know, they were proud of her. And, you know, who wouldn't be? But he also said some other stuff, right? Yeah, they were baffled by these public claims to Indigenous ancestry.

They thought that they were maybe a publicity stunt or something like that. They, again, Bruce says, the family just didn't buy it. One little piece of evidence we have of that. At one point, her uncle Arthur decided to take action. A magazine article had just come out, very high profile magazine saying she was indigenous. Uncle Arthur said that's enough. So he went down to the Wakefield daily item, the local newspaper, and he wanted to set the record straight. And he told them that she didn't have any, quote, Indian blood in her, quoting the article,

and not a bit of Cree heritage. We were told flat out that, you know, she was my Uncle Albert's child and she was pretending that she was not. So this is what you're hearing from her extended family. But you also spoke with a freelance journalist named Jacqueline Keeler. She's at Yankton Sioux.

She's a member of the Navajo Nation. And she's a journalist who exposes people who are posing as Indigenous. Yep. Last year, she was watching a PBS documentary about Buffy's life. Some red flags go off, right? She starts to become suspicious. I'm just like, wait a minute. This is just like those

stories I hear pretendians tell. I was just like, it just didn't add up. You know, it just sounded fake. So she starts digging into genealogical records. And it's important because in Buffy's authorized biographies, there's two of them. She claims that her birth certificate doesn't exist, right? So as I started researching this, that was something that really jumped out to me because on the first page of both of these biographies, it says there's no birth certificate. One of them says it's impossible to find any documentation

about her early life. And they both suggest that record keeping at the time was poor, more the documents could have been destroyed. So they're kind of attempting explanations as to why this documentation doesn't exist. Right. But you spoke with experts who said that this is a common narrative, that the no records, the destroyed records is a common narrative that folks posing as Indigenous often lean on.

One expert told me if all of the churches burned down, that have allegedly burned down because records have gone missing, we would have no churches in this country. You see the same patterns in these stories. Documents were lost. In fact, Native people are extremely well documented. We have to be well documented so the settler state can manage, you know, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, so it can manage land allotments, so it could manage residential schools. Remember, it was trying to control us, corral us, put us

into institutions and assimilate us. In her email to CBC, Buffy's lawyer said that many adoption records were destroyed by Canadian governments. How does that line up with things you've heard from Canadian government agencies? Well, so we went to the Saskatchewan government and asked them,

have any records disappeared? They've been storing these birth records in secure government facilities since 1922. They told been storing these birth records in secure government facilities since 1922. They told us they're unaware of any birth records that have been destroyed by fire or flood or missing for any other reason. We asked them about adoption records and they said, you know, no, we have all the records from all of the adoptions that have happened in the Ministry of Social Services.

In reviewing articles, interviews with Buffy, she talks about, she went looking for, you know, birth records. And in 2022, she went to Q host Tom Power saying, my adoption records are inaccessible. You have to understand what it's like to be an Indigenous person who has been adopted. Yeah. The records are sealed. You don't get to find out anything. Yeah.

I mean, in the 40s. We asked the Saskatchewan government about this. Ministry of Social Services told us that since 2017, adult adoptees can easily go ahead and access their birth records. Right. One other thing that Buffy has talked about publicly is that she was a survivor of the 60s scoop. In Canada, we had something that sometimes a little bit later referred to as the big scoop, where Native children were removed from the home. They're assigned a birthday.

They're assigned kind of a biography. So in many cases, adoptive people don't really know what the true story is. In fact, a letter that we got from her lawyer, it said that Buffy St. Marie was a likely survivor of the 60s scoop. It is worth noting that the 60s scoop is widely recognized to have started in 1951. Buffy, however, was born in 1941. It's not clear how those dates jive. There's a moment in your piece when you're talking about Jacqueline Keillor, who's the freelance journalist we mentioned before.

And she discovered that sitting in the town hall vault in Stoneham, Massachusetts was Buffy's birth record that Buffy had said didn't exist. And you actually went there, right? And you met with the town clerk responsible for the vital records. What'd you learn? Yeah. So went to this old brick building, not far from where Buffy grew up and met Maria Sagarino. She's the town clerk. Right.

She's responsible for all the birth records in this vault. So it's this old vault. You pull the door back and there's just binders all over the place of birth records that go back years. And they're all, you know, in sequential order in these binders. So she pulled out the binder from 1941, started flipping through them and got to birth certificate number 49. And she pulled it out of its sleeve. It's handwritten from the hospital. And the record said, Beverly Jean Santa Maria.

So Buffy's name used to be Beverly Jean, changed it to Buffy, was born in Stoneman, Massachusetts, February 20th, 1941. Her parents were Albert and Winifred Santa Maria. The document says father, white, mother, white, baby was white. It was signed, hand signed by a doctor who says she was born at 3 a.m. in Stoneham, Massachusetts. Right. So presumably someone who's been adopted from Canada is not going to have this birth certificate. Yes, that's certainly what Maria Sagorino said.

She says this is an original record. It looks like all the other ones and it follows precisely the same template. all the other ones, and it follows precisely the same template. I can say absolutely with 100% certainty that this is the original birth certificate. Beverly Jean Santa Maria was born in Stoneman, Massachusetts at New England Sanitarium and Hospital on February 20th, 1941. She was not born in Canada. And then, so there's the birth certificate, but then there's more paper evidence

that starts piling up. Can you tell me about some of the other documents that you discovered in your research that starts seriously calling her story into doubt? Yeah, so we found a number of documents that all tell essentially the same story. So we have a copy of a life insurance policy that was taken out

for Buffy when she was a little girl by her mom and dad. And it says she was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts in 1941. The U.S. Census, when Buffy was nine, says she's a white girl. She was born in Massachusetts to the St. Marie's. Alan, her older brother, he went on to enroll in the military. And in his statement of personal history to the military, he was asked for the names of his family and when they were born. And he said his sister was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts in 1941, just like the birth certificate. Even Buffy herself confirmed that she was born in Massachusetts in 1941. We had a copy of her marriage record from 1982 when she married Jack Nietzsche, who was a Hollywood composer. And so on the certificate from the County of Los Angeles, you can see it says she was born February 20th, 1941

to Albert and Winifred Santa Maria in Massachusetts and Buffy signs it. So now Buffy's lawyers have sent a long written statement. I guess CBC's put in requests for interviews. That's not happening, but you've got this letter back. What's the response from her lawyer been? Yeah, we've had a bit of correspondence. So in mid-September, her lawyer told us that at no point has Buffy personally misrepresented her ancestry or any other details about her history or personal history to the public. And they said if there's any perceived inconsistency that we've found in her story, those inconsistencies can be explained by the truth. Now, as you said, we've asked for an interview.

That hasn't happened. Buffy's lawyer did tell us the research shows that sometimes children who are adopted by parents in Massachusetts were issued new birth certificates with the name of their adoptive parents, suggesting that may have happened in this case. We asked the town clerk about that, and she said, no, no, no, that's not what happened in this case. Finally, her lawyer did tell us that Buffy is entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy about her personal genealogy and her family history. Happy Holidays! I'm Frank Cappadocia, Dean of Continuous Professional Learning at Humber Polytechnic.

And I'd like you to set a goal for 2025 to sharpen your skills and get promoted. Register for a professional designation, micro-credential, or certificate with Humber's Continuous Professional Learning and ignite your career journey this new year. Our experts deliver accelerated learning from resilience-based leadership to electric vehicle fundamentals. In learning options that work with your ambitious lifestyle. Adapt, evolve, and excel. Go to humber.ca slash cpl to get started. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because

money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cups. If you look back on her career as you have, how do you see her ancestry claims shifting over the years? Yeah, so what we did was looked for every written record we could find about Buffy going back as far as we could, all the way back to her high school and even to her elementary school days. The first mention we find anywhere of her as being indigenous is in a 1961 newspaper article that referred to her as an American Indian girl. Right. And she's 20 at the time.

She was about 20 at the time. And then over time, you see the references to her indigeneity become more specific. So in 1963, there is one article from the Fort Lauderdale News, another one from the New York Times, in which she's called an Algonquin Indian woman. Times, in which she's called an Algonquin Indian woman. In the Detroit Free Press, she's referred to as Mi'kmaq. In another newspaper article, she says she is half Mi'kmaq in a quote to the newspaper. And by the end of the year, she's referred to as a Cree Indian folk singer. Cree Indian folk singer. So in this space of like about 10 months,

you have Algonquin, Cree, Mi'kmaq, all these different claims in a very short period of time. Right. And I think it's worth pointing out when we're saying Indian here, in our conversation here, we're using it as a direct quote from a historical publication or an interview. Exactly. Yeah.

Okay. There's something else we've got to talk about here. At this point, and it's the mid-70s, Buffy's career is in transition, and there's this growing family turmoil. Questions about her identity. This is something Buffy's cousin Bruce talked about with you, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is a turmoil that had been felt for some time and he certainly noticed it himself. So he, again, he's younger than Buffy, but he distinctly remembers being told, do not

talk about our family connection to Buffy. He remembers a time when he was talking with his friends, was kind of bragging that, yeah, we're related to her. And his parents said like, shut up about that. Don't talk about that um and he was told like there could be legal consequences troubles i remember those stories uh growing up um that don't talk about it you know we don't want any trouble you know let her be let her do what she wants to do because we don't want to lose our house. You know, we don't want lawyers coming and suing us for defamation.

She instilled that fear in our relatives. And around that time, Buffy's brother, Alan, so Heidi, who we heard earlier, her father, gets a letter in the mail from a lawyer in Los Angeles. And it's a heavy letter, right? So tell me about that. Yeah. It's a heavy letter, right? So tell me about that. Yeah. So Alan, her older brother, and Heidi's father gets this letter from a lawyer who says he represents his sister.

And it accuses him of defaming her and attempting to interfere with her employment prospects. So threatening her employment prospects, like how? What do you mean? Okay. So there's a bit of a backstory here. What I'm going to tell you is now coming from Heidi and from some letters, some correspondence we have from Alan. So here's how it goes.

A bit before that letter arrives, Alan, who's a commercial pilot, lands a plane in New York City. As people are getting off the plane, it turns out one of the passengers was his sister. They greet one another. Buffy introduces a guy who's traveling with her as a PBS producer. This is my brother, Alan. This is the PBS producer. That's it. They move on.

A few weeks later, after that, Alan gets a phone call from this guy, this PBS producer. That's it. They move on. A few weeks later after that, Alan gets a phone call from this guy, this PBS producer. I just want to confirm that you are her biological brother. Is that right? Right. Alan said, yes, that's right. We have the same parents, Caucasian parents. Okay. But you don't look indigenous. Right. And, and he says, you know, no, I'm not. Like, yeah, we have the same parents. They're Caucasian parents. And no, I'm not indigenous. And the conversation ends.

And he doesn't think much more about it until that letter arrives. Okay, so what's the answer? So the letter is threatening to sue. But what's inside the letter is another letter, a handwritten note from his sister. And this letter alleges that Alan sexually assaulted her as a child. And she says, if you ever interfere with my employment prospects again, I will talk about your sexual abuse with your wife, your employer, and with the police. Okay, so Jeff, what do we actually know about these allegations of sexual abuse? Okay, so we do know that Buffy didn't just make them in this letter.

She did go public with them in her 2018 biography. In that biography, she explicitly accuses her brother of having sexually abused her. We also have letters from Alan that he wrote around that time to family members in which he denied the allegations, said they were horrific allegations, and they were not true. It's just really not possible for us to know which version of events here is actually the truth. I want to turn back to something you mentioned earlier, which is Buffy's connection to the Piepot First Nation in Saskatchewan. So she's been adopted into this community there. How have they, the Piepot Nation,

how have they responded the Piapot Nation, have they responded to these allegations? Well, very recently, we got a letter from the Piapot family. This is a very painful topic for them, and they are fully backing and defending Buffy. They say, look, she was adopted into our family. She's a part of our community. We love her. She loves us.

It's nobody else's business to say who's part of our community or who's not part of our community. And they say, according to their community traditions, because of this adoption, we consider her indigenous. And it's not up to any other outside colonial institution to tell us whether or not she's indigenous. Right. Okay, so she's indigenous. Right. Okay. So that, that, that's, it's interesting. The, aside from the, their response, uh, it is a bombshell of a story. And I imagine there are going to be indigenous folks, uh, who, you know, find this pretty breathtaking. There's going to be a lot of upset folks. So I guess I, what I want to ask is, is knowing that, why do you think it's

important to do these kinds of investigations? So I have been doing this sort of work looking at, you know, so-called pretendians for more than two years. And in that time, I've talked with a lot of indigenous people, a lot of indigenous experts, and they tell me this is very important work. jobs, awards, honors, or even, say, speaking for Indigenous people while not being Indigenous, displacing genuine Indigenous people. One of the other things that's really jumped out to me as I've been doing this work is how unbelievably common this is. Experts that we talk to like Kim TallBear say it's a serious problem and institutions need to address it. And she told me she hopes that this story, because Buffy is so well known and so well loved around the world, that this story will draw attention to this issue and show people why it's so important. All right. Thank you so much for telling me about your research.

Yeah, I'm happy to do it. Thanks. After we recorded this conversation, Buffy St. Marie posted statements on social media. She says she's always been honest, that she doesn't know where she's from or who her birth parents are. She called allegations about her identity, quote, deeply hurtful. In a video, she goes on to call herself a proud member of the Native community with deep roots in Canada. But there are also many things I don't know, which I've always been honest about. I don't know where I'm from, who my birth parents are, or how I ended up a misfit in a typical white Christian New England town. But I realized decades ago that I would never have the answer to these questions.

All right, you can watch the full documentary on CBC's The Fifth Estate. It's out tonight. That's all for today. This week, Front Burner was produced by Rafferty Baker, Shannon Higgins, Joyta Shingupta, Lauren Donnelly, and Derek Vanderwyk. Sound design was by Mackenzie Cameron and Sam McNulty. Music's by Joseph Shabison. The senior producer is Elaine Chao.

Our executive producer is Nick McKay-Blocos. And I'm Damon Fairless. Thanks for listening. FrontBurner will be back on Monday. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.