Bombshell report questions Oscar-winning singer Buffy Sainte-Marie's Indigenous background

Buffy Sainte-Marie has been previously praised for being a barrier-breaking, Indigenous Canadian icon, but the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) reported she might be lying.

The 82-year-old folk singer has previously claimed she was born in Canada on a Piapot Cree reservation. She said she was then adopted by white parents as part of the nation's Sixties Scoop. This infamous government program took Indigenous children from their families and gave them to white parents as a way of forced assimilation.

But according to the CBC, none of this happened to Buffy. They ran a feature on the singer which alleged she was a "pretendian," someone who fakes having Indigenous ancestry.

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The CBC feature cited a birth certificate that claimed Buffy was born Beverly Jean Santamaria in Stoneham, Massachusetts in the United States to parents with European ancestors. If that wasn't enough, it claimed various members of Buffy's family said: "Her story is an elaborate fabrication."

Buffy has been vocal about her Cree heritage, speaking about it in the 1970s when she appeared on the children's program Sesame Street. She also won an Oscar for Best Original Song in 1983 for co-writing Up Where We Belong from the film An Officer and A Gentleman.

She was considered the first Indigenous person to win this award, but now that's being called into question. Buffy rose to fame in the 1960s during the popularity wave of folk singers.

Various podcasts and documentaries have focused on her life and her work fighting for the rights of the Indigenous. In 2021, her face appeared on a Canadian stamp.

Members of the Indigenous community are shocked and outraged after the claims made by the CBC became public. Some members of the community felt like their heritage, struggles, and history were taken advantage of by Buffy in order to advance her career and status.

"It's theft of opportunities, resources. It's theft of our stories," said Kim TallBear, an Indigenous scholar who is a professor of native studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

Before the CBC program aired, Buffy released a statement that called their allegations against her "hurtful." She claimed in her statement that because of the lack of documentation, she only knows about her ancestry through her "growing up mother," or the woman who adopted her.

"My mother told me many things, including that I was adopted and that I was Native, but there was no documentation for Indigenous children born in the 1940s," her statement read. She added she "will never know" who her birth parents are or where she's from.

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