It really saddens me to hear that you feel/felt that way about your identity/origins. I value the existence of you and your culture.

My thoughts:

As a settler Canadian I’ve been told blood quantum is a racist colonial concept, and what really makes a person indigenous is if they are embraced as a member of a first nation community.

So my initial reaction (ie to the revelation she has european roots) was:

It’s a person’s life that makes them indigenous, not their genes. It doesn’t really matter if she was born off reserve to settler parents, if she’s a member of a first nation.

The article talks about how 1962 when she was in her twenties she asked a Cree family to give her an ‘Indian Name’, and adopt her into their family. She says they did.

BUT It seems likely to me that she (fraudulently) presented herself to the Cree family as a ‘scoop’ victim to receive a sympathy name.

And then:

In the space of those 10 months [1962-1963], she was referred to as Algonquin, full-blooded Algonquin, Mi’kmaq, half-Mi’kmaq and Cree.

So clearly the naming/adoption didn’t start as anything serious.

It seems to me she received the sympathy naming, then over the course of years wormed her way into the family. Actually it’s pretty grotesque because the family had had a daughter Buffy’s age taken from them so this was like extreme manipulation of the vulnerable.

All this is to say: Buffy didn’t grow up facing the challenges of an indigenous child. Her purported accession to the Cree nation was likely based on fraud and grotesque emotional manipulation.

She has received so much of what was reserved for people that had to overcome real, actual oppression/prejudice and state abuse and trauma. Is this the biggest case of cultural appropriation in history?

Brought you by “Keep America Beautiful”

Her adoptive first nations family still claims her: https://globalnews.ca/news/10049385/buffy-sainte-marie-accusations-identity/

They literally have her Massachusetts birth certificate. There is nothing tying her to being indigenous except her wanting to be perceived as such.

It’s not just a question of blood quantum … it’s basically a question of theft … theft of identity, theft of culture and misrepresentation.

If I claimed I was cousin and I made a million dollars because of it, how would you feel about it? If everything I own, everything I did, every award I gained and every time I was celebrated it was because everyone said I was your cousin … how would you feel about that?

It doesn’t matter if there is no money involved … but it matters a lot when someone starts making millions out of it all.

It’s also sadistic … to think that a person could build an identity, a persona, a career worth millions on the backs of oppressed, poor people that have no chance, and then show no remorse for it all. Her career is based on what she stole from people who already had nothing. The world gave her millions so that she could share a few thousand.

It’s sickening … and to defend all that or be apologetic about it all is not right either.

There is a big gulf between “belonging to a tribe” and claiming to be a Sixty’s Scoop survivor born at a hospital that never existed.

I don’t think anyone (certainly not the CBC) is claiming that the Cree Nation and the Piapot family weren’t allowed to adopt her, and that she isn’t a member of that nation. But the evidence points, beyond the shadow of doubt, that she was born to a white Italian American family in Boston. And that she has a long history of lying about her original heritage (often changing the story when it’s convenient for her), and threatening her own family if they outed her.

So she’s perfectly allowed to be “tribal” — that seems to not be in contention. But she shouldn’t be lying about being a Sixty’s Scoop baby who never knew her birth mother (which is odd, considering she would have been a teenager when the Scoop started in the 50’s), or about being born in Canada and adopted (both her birth certificate and her own family refute this), or about her birth certificate having been destroyed in a fire in a facility that never existed, or about her changing tribal heritage (first Mi’kmaq, then Algonquin, then Cree), or about whether her mother was dead or alive…

The lies are the problem, along with the benefits she’s obtained from those lies. If the relevant Cree Nation wants to keep her, and the Piapot family claims her as one of their own — that’s perfectly fine and within their right. But that doesn’t give Ms. St-Marie the right to rewrite her own personal history. There is a big difference between “citizenship”, “family bonds”, and “heritage” — and it’s the latter of which she appears to have lied about for a very, very, very long time.