Still Fakey After All These Years
5th November 2023
Folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie got her start in the Greenwich Village scene and during the 1960s became an indigenous icon. In 1975 she showed up on “Sesame Street” proclaiming, “We want kids to understand that Indians exist. We really are real.” And as Buffy explained, “Cree Indians are my tribe, and we live in Canada.” That nation showered Sainte-Marie with awards, made her a companion of the Order of Canada, and even put her on a postage stamp.
In 2019, St. Marie appeared at a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) music festival, where she complained about “moms who have such a pride in family, maybe patriotism and tradition,” before her performance of “The Universal Soldier.” Behind the scenes, the CBC was busy checking birth records, newspaper accounts, and interviewing relatives. Last month, the CBC’s 6,000-plus-word report outed the soi disant Cree from Saskatchewan as Beverly Jean Santamaria, born in 1941 in Stoneham, Massachusetts, with no indigenous ancestry whatsoever.