Buffy Sainte-Marie's claims of Cree ancestry and birth on Sask. First Nation removed from her website
CBC
The biography of Buffy Sainte-Marie on her official website no longer claims she is a Cree woman "likely" born on the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan.
The changes were made on Buffysainte-marie.com days after CBC released its Oct. 27 investigation that questioned the famous singer's decades-long claim to Cree ancestry.
In her first statement to CBC News since the investigation published, Sainte-Marie wrote that she removed material from her website in order to limit the "criticism, threats and abuse" supporters who have defended her in public have faced since the investigation was published.
"I have an obligation to protect them," her emailed statement said. "And it is for that reason alone that I have limited my public engagement and removed facts from my website that you are now trying to use to build more controversy."
CBC uncovered her birth certificate, which says she was born on Feb. 20, 1941, to Albert and Winifred Santamaria in Stoneham, Mass. That is the American family that Sainte-Marie has claimed adopted her from Piapot when she was a baby.
According to the Wayback Machine, a digital archive of web pages, as recently as Nov. 7, Sainte-Marie's biography on her website twice described her as a "Cree singer-songwriter." It also said she "is believed to have been born in 1941 on the Piapot First Nation reserve in Saskatchewan and taken from her biological parents when she was an infant."
Those claims have been deleted.
The biography also described her as "the first Indigenous person ever to win an Oscar for writing the hit song, Up Where We Belong from An Officer and a Gentleman," and it noted that in 1998, she "received the Native Americans in Philanthropy's Louis T. Delgado Award for Native American Philanthropist of the Year."
Both of those claims have also been removed.
This sentence has also been deleted: "In today's climate of damaging #fakenews and toxic hubris, Buffy Sainte-Marie's incisive honesty, clarity and intelligent compassion stand out in sharp relief."
Michelle Good, an author, retired lawyer and member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, recently wrote a column in the Toronto Star about the controversy surrounding CBC's investigation.
"She has likely been advised to remove these [references to Indigeneity] as the controversy brews," Good said. "She's likely trying to avoid a confrontation about having received awards that she was not entitled to."
Ira Lavallee, acting chief of Piapot, says he finds Sainte-Marie's changing stories confusing.
"That's clearly disappointing that she has removed any reference to Piapot and her Indigenous heritage," he said. "It seems she's rewriting ... her entire narrative."
