Buffy St Marie

Oops.

Thats a shame love that elliptical voice.
& Illuminations is pretty classic.

Wonder if Red Nation will spend much time on the subject on Monday. They've mainly been talking about Palestine for last few weeks. But they really don't like Pretendians for pretty clear reasons. & if this is true it will be one of the bigger cases of it won't it. Or has she mainly done good in changing attitudes? Which may make it even worse?

xp I believe Iron Eyes Cody got the same "He's a part of the community now, blood quantum is a tool of the oppressors" reaction.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/buffy-sainte-marie-reaction-piapot-1.7011149

This was helpful to read

I believe Iron Eyes Cody got the same "He's a part of the community now, blood quantum is a tool of the oppressors" reaction.

haha no he didn't. maybe in some isolated cases, maybe from some individuals on social media, but in general, no.

her video response was so sad. oof.

this really sucks but yeah she's totally lying, I can't square so many things in this article even trying to give her her benefit of the doubt

https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/buffy-sainte-marie

Yeah the article is pretty impressively researched/organized in its presentation.

sad. what a crazy story.

It really strikes me as disingenuous that the CBC is spending all this time and resources to take down 82 year old retired singer Buffy St Marie as some kind of victory for representation. Like at least Liz Warren was running for president

wtf whiney, wow you don't get it

I mean, I guess I don’t? I’m not Canadian!

Like obviously this is Very Bad, but why now and why the CBC?

cuzza the tipster. they got a tip.

apparently a native person of standing in CA (Kim Tallbear) began this callout process, if that helps?

It does, actually, thank you

salute

crazy how her brother was sending letters to newspapers in the 70s to tell them that she was not native. oof.

anything to help you avoid you reading the article whiney we're all happy to help

Appreciated!

Pretendians have been committing fraud in Canada for decades. It runs very deep. It's common for whites to fake Indigenous status just to get scholarships and grants. Buffy's lie, her betrayal is very, very serious, especially at a time when the country is finally reckinong with its complacency in genocide. She did a LOT of good, but while posing, CLAIMING she's Cree. Look at the damned sesame street clips we all grew up with. She was lying to our faces.

(Sorry, complicity in genocide)

This question "why didn't the CBC just shrug it off" also ignores that they have (apparently unwittingly) been relaying the deception themselves, creating podcasts and broadcasting concerts based around her false identity. So if they didn't make the revelation and someone else did later, it would look a lot like a cover-up.

A friend of mine who knows far more about most Canadian artists than I do wrote this on his Facebook wall: "I might never watch The Fifth Estate again. Shame on them."

...and she's not even a Canadian artist!

not cree but super skrull?

There's stuff floating around right now proposing that if one reads between the lines of Buffy's statement, she is implying that she is the daughter of an affair, and that her birth father is Indigenous. This explanation would actually explain a lot of the contradictions here: birth registered normally, maintains she is Indigenous but doesn't actually know the details of which people is hers, her siblings might not know, etc. It is understandable why, if her mother had told her the secret of her origins, she might have made up a cover story about being adopted.

I'm personally surprised that BSM wouldn't just come out and say this to reporters, but also recognize how a person in that position (who has some old-fashioned views about privacy and propriety, too), might decline to do so - even in the face of reporting like this.

except that isn't true as far as I know, and it has been proven that she has no indigenous DNA (going off comments seen elsewhere)

ok not quite. from yetimike's FB page comments:

"A DNA test revealed her son is related to her blood niece, so she’s not adopted. It also shows almost zero Native American DNA. Not once single person in her family was ever told she was adopted, or that they had any Native DNA."

so... sean might be right here?

it would also explain the baffling "wrong side of the blanket" comment in her statement

fuck, idk

So her son has almost zero Native American DNA? Wouldn't that mean that she couldn't have enough Native American DNA to establish indigenous biological parentage?

no idea tbh, deferring to akm here

btw I literally saw "blood quantum is an oppressor POV" as a comment in that FB thread

So her son has almost zero Native American DNA? Wouldn't that mean that she couldn't have enough Native American DNA to establish indigenous biological parentage?

Wouldn't this mean his father wasn't Native, either?

there's also an old FB post by Buffy's sister Lainey (which has since been made private), that apparently shows 30% Native American heritage? anyway, it's all confusing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/17hmd0z/comment/k6u52jw/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

yes, if there is no trace of that DNA in her children then she's lying.

investiation into her actually happened over a year ago (I know Jacqueline Keeler, who got a pulitzer for her article on Sacheen Littlefeather and who has gotten a shit ton of flack from people for her work uncovering indigenous frauds. The vast majority of these frauds work in academia and aren't big names like BSM. I haven't always liked how Jackie comes across on social media and she's gotten into what I felt were pointless back and forths with people on twitter, but her work on this list was good and came from a good place. She chose not to publicly target BSM in part due to all the crap she got over the Littlefeather revelation and earlier blowback from supporters of writer Rebecca Roanhorse, but Kim was also involved in this work and she, I believe, took this to the CBC. Lots of people don't like Kim now either but she's generally less controversial).

DNA doesn't mean much for proof of identity. Lots of people will have some native DNA; that doesn't mean the tribes will accept you. Having a native person in your family line back six or seven generations is fairly meaningless. But it does work the other way; if there is no trace of it, claiming identity puts you on pretty shaky ground, unless you are descended from Freedmen or the like where there was a prior arrangement with the tribes and formal recognition.

There are people who say that only a tribe should be in a position of determining who is native and who isn't. Lots of tribes are also shitty about things and don't enroll people they should. There is no clear cut answer here, and in some cases there are grey lines. But this, like the Littlefeather story, is pretty egregious. I was unsurprised by Littlefeather; my mother lived in Salinas in the late 60's/early 70's, and I distinctly remember her telling me when I was young that she wasn't native and everyone there knew it at the time. But BSM isn't someone I'd ever heard rumors about.

Quite revolting if the '"acceptable face of the Indian" isn't indigenous. But probably more about white gaze anyway.

I thought after having said she had done positive things for changing attitudes i.e. to indigenous people that would be pretty white gaze too. Since the various peoples were vilified through that white gaze in the first place.

Sorry to hear about this since I do enjoy her music.

There's stuff floating around right now proposing that if one reads between the lines of Buffy's statement, she is implying that she is the daughter of an affair, and that her birth father is Indigenous. This explanation would actually explain a lot of the contradictions here: birth registered normally, maintains she is Indigenous but doesn't actually know the details of which people is hers, her siblings might not know, etc. It is understandable why, if her mother had told her the secret of her origins, she might have made up a cover story about being adopted.

I'm personally surprised that BSM wouldn't just come out and say this to reporters, but also recognize how a person in that position (who has some old-fashioned views about privacy and propriety, too), might decline to do so - even in the face of reporting like this.

― sean gramophone, Sunday, October 29, 2023 8:30 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

it certainly seems like that's what she was implying in this article (shared above) https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/buffy-sainte-marie-speaks-out-regarding-questions-of-cree-ancestry/

but if this were the case wouldn't she have told her brother about it after the incident with the pbs executive, rather than having her lawyer send him a letter threatening to sue?

she also claims in that same video that her mother winifred saint-marie is part mikmaq. so the story isn't just that the mother had an affair with an indigenous man, it's that the mother herself was part indigenous (which no one else in the family corroborates)

my shock is pretty simple. i had no idea she grew up with a white family and went to high school in massachusetts! its not like i ever heard buffy talking about her crazy days in a 50s american high school. i had always assumed that she was from canada and was native and i thought this also explained her accent. and her singing voice. her speaking voice always sounded - to me - like other native people and other canadian people i had heard. there are americans from the east - mass, maine, etc - who have french-canadian roots who sound like that.

i mean maybe she does talk about her time here in her autobiography. but that doesn't explain why her singing voice would have so many characteristics of native singers/speakers? i mean everyone puts on voices when they sing. i get that. young bob dylan was not an old coal miner. but he was also not saying that he actually WAS an old coal miner.

anyway, the whole thing is sad all around for everyone.

xp
Am I remembering right that Jack Kerouac was initially a French speaker from Lowell, Massachusetts

(it was definitely easier to make up your story in prior decades. singers and actors and lots of other people did it all the time. harder for people to check unless they did a lot of detective work.)

Lowell had/has a big population of French-Canadians. they came in the 1800s.

xp I thought Dylan was notorious for picking up quirks from those he was around and making a persona that was not valid and only came out later, though probably as he moved onto his next version of himself . Though it didn't last 50+ years and was more over a few months or couple of years.

they were also immediately hated:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/french-canadian-immigrants-struck-fear-into-new-england-communities-180972951/

btw I literally saw "blood quantum is an oppressor POV" as a comment in that FB thread

yes, I think we're on the same thread -- it is very confusing to me that a prevailing mood among several friends seems to be rooted in "she's great and isn't hurting anybody, she's done a lot of good" combined with some "identity is performative" stuff -- to me, that the tribe says "she's one of us, full stop" carries real and definitive weight, in one sense that's all there is to say -- but in another sense, no: that's lovely, but there is more to say. there's so much "the cbc are monsters for airing this" / "the reporter sucks, look at what else they've done" and these all look to me like really "no matter what, I'm not accepting this."

i have no dog in this fight - which might be disqualifying! - but i feel like she could have used this lie for good or for evil and it seems like she clearly used it for good. so maybe a spirit of magnanimity and generosity could prevail. i guess you could say why is this fake indian sucking all the oxygen out of the room when you could have had real cree telling their own stories and singing their own songs all these years. and well yeah.

"i guess you could say why is this fake indian sucking all the oxygen out of the room"

because she's the most famous native american singer in the world? that's a pretty big deal. its such an integral part of her art and music.

Yeah that's exactly it, in the article the native women who investigate "pretendians" talk about how they take money, honors, and resources intended for actual naticve people, it's a huge betrayal and benefitting off genocide

right i meant “why be generous to this person who has, by virtue of her stupendous fame, likely elbowed real cree out of the frame”

People should really read the article!

https://pitchfork.com/news/buffy-sainte-marie-defends-indigenous-heritage-ahead-of-investigative-report/

i did see that. i meant a response, which usually comes after something

Well she got ahead of it.

(her lawyers also respond on her behalf in the article, and she declined to be interviewed for it.)

I’m going to listen to this today:

https://dont-call-me-resilient.simplecast.com/episodes/how-we-tell-buffy-sainte-maries-story-matters-explained-by-a-60s-scoop-survivor

Would they have written it at 3:15am though? Or just made up a time of birth? (I'm honestly asking, and I suppose these are questions that could be addressed if the issue was dug into further.)

― Phair · Jagger/Richards · Carl Perkins (morrisp), Wednesday, November 8, 2023 11:44 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

You didn’t know that after a kid is born the parents can make up whatever time of birth they want? All of mine were born at 4:20 on June 9th.

some interesting discussion here but ultimately imho the inference doesn’t rely on any single piece of evidence (ie birth certificate) that is alone dispositive, sufficient or necessary for the conclusion that BSM pretended. rather it’s all of the evidence taken together that makes it basically incontrovertible. the lawyerly tactic (i mean this non pejoratively) of trying to sow doubt by unraveling the weakest points of the argument won’t really work, there are just too many things that all line up and point in the same direction, can’t all be coincidences

having said that, i haven’t seen anyone address the fact that the numbers on the birth certificate line up sequentially with other births and therefore aren’t consistent with adoption. so i think the certificate is more of a smoking gun than some want to admit

I do agree that there could have been more to say in this section. For instance, it's hard to know exactly how much independent weight to give to the record numbering. Like, from BSM's point of view, if you assume that the birth certificate doesn't reflect her actual birth parents and birth location, then it doesn't seem like a huge stretch to think that the birth date on the certificate is also false, i.e. they just entered the date the certificate was written (and that this accounts for the record being at #49). That's something a historical expert might have helped with - whether this is plausible given adoption practices at the time.

― jmm

what i meant more was has anyone found a historical expert offering evidence that the contrary interpretation is correct? if so i haven’t seen it. the birth record specifies that her parents stayed in the hospital for 3 hours and that she was born at 3:15am. not clear why they would fill something in for those field if it were an adoption

@ flopson, to be clear, I wasn't trying to "sow doubt" as to point out that the particular lack-of-follow-up regarding the singular assertions made by the Stoneham town hall clerk was, broadly, hurtful to adoptees, as the things that were being expressed were by-no-means conclusive. I remain convinced by the article and doc that some manner of deception was at play, for sure. Personally, and my relative agrees, the presence of a "birth hospital" and "delivering doctor" (the same hospital and doctor that had delivered BSM's sister) on the birth certificate effectively leaves us both sufficiently convinced that "BSM was not adopted, as she has claimed"; but again, I don't know for sure if this, too, was standard practice in the issuing of birth certificates for adopted children.

To be clear, I don't think she was adopted either. I think the mass of evidence points this way, and to make the contrary work basically means explaining away all the evidence.

sorry didn’t mean to imply that that’s what you were doing or that that was your motive. unfortunate choice of word on my part. all i meant the sum of evidence is much greater than its parts here

(xp)

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