The Canadian Broadcasting Company has launched a documentary and article calling into query the Indigenous heritage of Buffy Sainte-Marie. The embellished singer-songwriter, who launched a preemptive assertion yesterday, maintains that she has Native ancestry, “however there was no documentation as was frequent for Indigenous kids born within the 1940’s.”
Based mostly on its documentary sequence The Fifth Property, CBC’s report cites members of the artist’s household, in addition to genealogical documentation, to recommend that Sainte-Marie’s “story is constructed on an elaborate fabrication.” Her account of her ancestry, CBC provides, “has been a shifting narrative, stuffed with inconsistencies and inaccuracies.”
A delivery certificates obtained by CBC lists Sainte-Marie’s mother and father as Albert and Winifred Santamaria, the white couple from Massachusetts who Sainte-Marie has mentioned adopted her. The certificates is signed by the identical physician who delivered Sainte-Marie’s sister, Lainey, in 1948.
In a 2018 interview, Sainte-Marie mentioned she was one in all many Native kids faraway from their properties, adopted, and “assigned sort of a biography,” in a observe often called the Sixties Scoop. “So, in lots of circumstances, adoptive individuals don’t actually know what the true story is.” However the Sixties Scoop, CBC notes, “is widely known to have began in 1951. Sainte-Marie was born in 1941.”
Stoneham’s city clerk, Maria Sagarino, who discovered the delivery certificates, mentioned, “I can say completely with 100 per cent certainty that that is the unique delivery certificates. Beverly Jean Santamaria was born in Stoneham, Mass., at New England Sanatorium and Hospital on Feb. 20, 1941.”
In an e mail to CBC, Sainte-Marie’s lawyer contended, “Analysis has additionally revealed that kids adopted by mother and father in Massachusetts had been generally issued new Massachusetts delivery certificates with the title of their adoptive mother and father.”
Sagarino objected to Sainte-Marie’s lawyer’s assertion, telling CBC, “It doesn’t seem that she was adopted in any manner, form or type.”
As well as, whereas Sainte-Marie’s lawyer mentioned the musician’s true delivery certificates was destroyed by Canadian governments, the federal government for the province of Saskatchewan advised CBC, “All adoptions that occurred inside the province of Saskatchewan have an adoption report on file with the Ministry of Social Companies.”
Elsewhere within the article, Sainte-Marie’s niece Heidi St. Marie advised CBC, “No one apart from Buffy ever talked about Buffy being adopted.” Her cousin Bruce Santamaria mentioned his household denied Sainte-Marie’s declare that she was adopted, and believed her declare to Indigenous ancestry was a publicity stunt. He added that his household advised tales of Buffy Sainte-Marie threatening members of the family with authorized motion in the event that they spoke out.
