Move over Liz Warren and “Sacheen Littlefeather”(aka Maria Cruz) — there’s another Pretendian set to take the plastic war-bonnet of World’s Fakest Indian.
For anyone under the age of 65, the name Buffy Sainte-Marie will mean nothing, but in the 60s and 70s, she was the Heap Biggum Squaw of the American Indian Movement. Sainte-Marie parlayed her “Indian” status into a superstar musical career in the 60s folk and protest song movements.
Sainte-Marie was so adamant about her Indian credentials that she once stormed the stage while Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys performed Miss Nickolodeon and ripped off Kinky’s feathered headdress. She was so committed that she called her son “Dakota Starblanket Wolfchild”. Presumably, Sitting Bull Crystal Sacagewa was already taken.
The only problem is that, like Fauxcahontas and Littlefaker, it was all a big, fat lie.
Canadian legend Buffy Sainte-Marie has continued to push back against doubts about her Indigenous ancestry following a CBC documentary that revealed evidence purporting to prove that she was actually born in Massachusetts to caucasian parents.
Indeed, Sainte-Marie in Massachusetts, to Albert Santamaria and Winifred Kendrick, of Italian and English ancestry, respectively. Her parents changed their surname to the Francophone Sainte-Marie during WWII. At least her parents were honest fakers.
But, like Bruce Pascoe, Sainte-Marie isn’t going to let such trifling stuff as the facts of her ancestry stand in the way of a lucrative lie.
“Being an ‘Indian’ has little to do with sperm tracking and colonial record keeping,” Sainte-Marie said in a statement to the Canadian Press. “It has to do with community, culture, knowledge, teachings, who claims you, who you love, who loves you and who’s your family.”
In this case, her family are a 100% Anglo-European couple from Massachusetts. A bit of RapidTan isn’t going to turn a basic white girl from the Boston suburbs into a bronzed Princess of the Plains, no matter how desperately she wants to believe it.
Sainte-Marie has maintained that she was born near Regina, Saskatchewan as a member of the Piapot First Nation, however that account was called into question by the CBC’s The Fifth Estate.
The program located her alleged birth certificate, which stated that she was born in 1941 in Stoneham, Mass to caucasian parents, and claimed to have found corroborating evidence in the form of a marriage certificate, a life insurance policy and the United States census.
For all her blatherskite about “family”, Sainte-Marie was apparently only too willing to throw her actual family under the bus for a bit of fame and fake prestige.
In a statement rejecting CBC’s claims, Sainte-Marie said she has never known the identity of her birth parents but remains “a proud member of the Native community with deep roots in Canada” […]
She went on to explain that she’s “heard from countless people with similar stories who do not know where they are from and feel victimized by these allegations.”
How do the actual Native Americans victimised by liars and troughers who fake up their phoney “indigenous heritage” in order to further their careers feel about this?
Because you better believe that they’re not too keen on these grubby Pretendians.
“This deception allowed her to benefit from a very deliberate and false narrative that misled thousands of Indigenous youth, adults and most tragically, Indigenous survivors of colonial harm,” the Indigenous Women’s Collective wrote on X.
The Post-Millennial
Kinda makes you glad the Texas Jewboy pissed her off.
