Buffy Sainte-Marie, the Elizabeth Warren of folk singers, has been stripped of another honor after it was discovered she has been pretending to be an Indian for some 60 years.
Sainte-Marie was born in 1941 as Beverly Jean Santamaria to a whiter-than-white English and Italian family in Massachusetts. Although her story has changed through the decades, she appeared to settle on the fable that she was born to Cree parents in Canada. Then, at age three, the cruel government stripped her from her birth parents to live with this white family in Massachusetts.
Most laughably, she’s claimed to be a victim of the infamous Sixties Scoop, where about 20,000 native children in Canada were stripped from their parents for adoption by white families. The Sixties Scoop began in the late 1950s. Sainte-Marie said she was “scooped” at age 3, which would’ve been 1944.
Sainte-Marie’s ruse collapsed after the CBC exposed her in late 2023 on its The Fifth Estate news program. You can watch the episode on YouTube, and even though this goes unmentioned, on top of the irrefutable evidence provided, the resemblance between Sainte-Marie and her Italian birth mother is unmistakable, as is the evidence proving Sainte-Marie a liar.
File/Vogue 1969/Singer Buffy Sainte-Marie wearing mirror-embroidered vest, satin shirt, and turquoise bracelet, and lying on her side and holding her Dobro guitar. (Photo by Jack Robinson/Condé Nast via Getty Images)
How this woman used her fake heritage to promote herself, advance her career (including a sweet-sweet Sesame Street gig) and obtain awards that would’ve otherwise gone to actual Indians is jaw-dropping. And it’s not as though Sainte-Marie could not have succeeded without the ruse. She’s a charismatic presence with a lovely voice who won an Oscar for her songwriting.
She really hit a moral bottom when she threatened to publicly accuse her older brother of sexually abusing her if he did not stop publicizing her true origins.
She also won numerous music awards set aside for natives. Most of those have since been revoked. And this week she lost her honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Toronto.
“The university did not publicly state a reason for the decision,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle, adding that the “move follows a series of revoked Canadian honors since CBC News’ 2023 investigation[.]”
Her Order of Canada appointment, one of the country’s highest civilian honors, was terminated by ordinance signed Jan. 3, 2025. The Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences later revoked her Juno Awards and Canadian Music Hall of Fame induction, citing eligibility requirements and Sainte-Marie’s confirmation that she is not Canadian.
The Polaris Music Prize also rescinded her 2015 award for “Power in the Blood” and a 2020 Heritage Prize for her 1964 debut album “It’s My Way,” saying its nominees must be Canadian citizens or permanent residents.
Citing health concerns, Sainte-Marie coincidentally ended her public appearances in 2023, the same year the CBC exposed her. She also denies she’s ever lied about her heritage.
What I find fascinating about this story is that it once again proves how little racism there is. Why would anyone pretend to be non-white in a racist culture? Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) pretending to be Indian only benefited her, and it was the same for Sainte-Marie.
We see white leftists pretending to be minorities over and over again, even as we’re lied to about “white privilege.”
People pretending to be Indians or black or whatever because they believe it will benefit their careers and social status might reveal something awful about them, but it reveals something pretty great about our society.