Buffy St Marie

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!

young bob dylan was not an old coal miner. but he was also not saying that he actually WAS an old coal miner.

He definitely was not saying he was nice Jewish boy from a respectable family in Minnesota.

Was he not(?) I haven’t read old interviews with him, but I wouldn’t have assumed he hid anything about his background… it’s such a big part of his story now, anyway.

yeah Bob had a few b.s. origin stories, like I think he said he had studied under Mance Lipscomb or something?

I mean a completely different thing that BSM obviously. also I guess see bullshitting as pretty core to Dylan

he was trying to imitate that wily storyteller persona a la woody. i think he said all kinds of things early on to reporters.

but there was that book that came out in the 60s where the guy went and talked to everyone in bob's hometown and college? he wasn't an enigma for long. i think it came out in the 60s. my memory is such crap in my crapitudinous decrepitude. i used to know things!

Positively Main Street by Toby Thompson. “That boy . . . this fellow, Toby . . . has got some lessons to learn.” —Bob Dylan, Rolling Stone, November 29, 1969

People should really read the article!

^^^^ on this. At least read up until the point where BSM sends threatening letters to her brother.

tbh the whole thing with the family, the uncles, the niece didn't sit too well with me because families can be extremely fucked up and full of old resentments and bitterness.

Especially when one member of a family is world famous and the rest of them aren't.

apologies for linking to something on tiktok but this guy has a good take on this

https://www.tiktok.com/@yllwhrseblackfoot/video/7295113394875649285

no need to apologise for for tiktok links!

I don't even have an account on there so I can only view them on desktop and have to dismiss a modal and everything.

that was good and certainly a good thing to amplify Native voices speaking on this issue no matter the platform

xxxxpost what the family says, especially and starting with her uncle's published letter to the local paper in the 60s, is supported by the birth certificate, with clerk spelling it out more in quoted comments and in video interview----obtained by a phone call to city hall, after 60 years of contradictory coverage/dgaf/print the legend---

Also her son's xxxxxpost DNA.

supported/made more plausible.

Finally got caught up on this. Article seems pretty airtight. To me it looks like she originally needed an exotic angle to stand out and just got in way too deep, perhaps to the point where she eventually bought into her own delusion.

to the point where she eventually bought into her own delusion.

yeah i definitely got that sense too

Being charitable you could see her as a young woman who didn't feel she fitted in her immediate milieu and circumstances and was looking around for something to belong to and believe in and found it - but took it too far.

"So you caught me, it seems"

Bravo.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/the-emotional-fallout-of-buffy-sainte-marie-revelations-transcript-1.7013768

Daemon Fairless interviewed Kim Wheeler (who produced Buffy's big Starwalker special last year), and Drew Hayden Taylor (director of the doc The Pretendians).

Without any offence intended here, I think the last four posts should be removed