O, Buffy. All very sad, but I believe her.

I'm an old folkie. 

When everyone else my age was listening to the Beach Boys and the Beatles, I was giving more than equal time to Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Tom Rush...And Buffy Sainte-Marie.

Her Many a Mile album was frequently spinning on the turntable throughout my high school and college years.

So many great songs: "Must I Go Round," "Maple Sugar Boy," "Piney Wood Hills," "Until It's Time For You To Go," and the still painfully relevant but no longer the reality "Welcome, Welcome, Emigrante." Her voice was so heartbreaking. I loved listening to her, and singing along with her - just without her pure, heartbreaking voice.

I liked Buffy, but didn't know all that much about her. She was local. A UMass grad. I knew that. At least I may have. And I definitely knew that she had Indigenous ancestry. Only we would have said Indian. And there was something Canadian floating around there. Canadian Indian?

Turns out, the Massachusetts part was right. But the Canadian and/or Indigenous. Maybe not so right.

It's all very murky. 

Sainte-Marie has certainly long been an outspoken advocate for Indigenous causes, and over the years, she has written a number of songs that focused on Indigenous peoples and issues - "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," "My Country Tis of Thy People Are Dying." 

She has long been associated with Canada. In the late 1970's, she was asked by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to sing for Queen Elizabeth when Queen E visited our neighbors to the North. At the time, she apparently told Canadian officials that she was an American, not a Canadian. But she was Canadian enough.

And when she was a young adult, Sainte-Marie was adopted by a Canadian Cree Piapot family, and began self-identifying as someone with Indigenous roots.

Anyway, it's not surprising that Canadians started thinking of Buffy Sainte-Marie as a Canadian, with bonus points for having Indigenous roots. More bonus points when, in 1983, she won an Oscar for co-writing the song "Up Where We Belong," from the movie An Officer and a Gentleman.

Along the line, she started to rack up Canadian awards. Junos, the Canadian equivalent of the Grammies. The Polaris music prize. Induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. Membership in the Order of Canada. 

Then this winter, Canada's government stripped Sainte-Marie of her Order of Canada award. In the days that followed, her other Canadian awards were rescinded as well.  

O, Canada had come to the realization that Buffy Sainte-Marie wasn't a Canadian. 

O, Buffy.

The story had been buzzing around for a couple of years that Sainte-Marie wasn't Canadian (and probably not Indigenous either). A journalist had sleuthed out er birthcertificate: born in Massachusetts, to Americans of Italian (the father) and English (the mother) descent. (If you're wondering about the French last name, at some point during World War II the parents, sensing antipathy towards Italians, Franco-phoned their last name from Santamaria to Sainte-Marie.)

As I said, it's all very murky. 

When the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) "outed" her American roots in 2023, Buffy Sainte-Marie had this to say:

"My growing up mom, who was proud to be part Mi'kmaq, told me many things, including that I was adopted and that I was native," Sainte-Marie said. " And later in life, as an adult, she also told me some things that I've never shared out of respect for her. That I hate sharing now, including that I may have been born on the wrong side of the blanket."

The singer also said she'd always been honest about not knowing some details about her roots. "I don't know where I'm from, who my birth parents are, or how I ended up a misfit in a typical white, Christian, New England town," she said. (Source: NPR) 

I'm with Buffy here. 

It's entirely possible that her mother told her that she had some Mi'kmaq heritage. Lots of New Englanders do. 

It's entirely possible that, later in life, her mother told her that her father wasn't her biological father, a man who could, in fact, have been Indigenous.

It's entirely possible that Buffy Sainte-Marie was, in fact, born in Canada, to Indigenous parents, and taken from those parents and shipped off to a set of adoptive parents in America. And that her original birth records were destroyed, her adoption records falsified into an American birth certificate. (A lot of really terrible things happened to Native-born children in Canada and the US, with the government and religious organizations conspiring to seize children and place them with "civilized" families. This was going on as recently as the 1980's.)

It's sad that Buffy Sainte-Marie has had her honors rescinded. And it's understandable that Canada wants awards designed for Canadians go to Canadians - even if Sainte-Marie never explicitly presented herself as a Canadian citizen, and these organizations had just assumed that she was.  

But it's entirely plausible that Buffy Sainte-Marie is an Indigenous person by birth (and not just from her young-adult adoption). And it's also possible that she was born in Canada. 

If we wait long enough, maybe Massachusetts will become Canada's 11th province, mooting the entire argument.

Meanwhile, I believe in Buffy. And still love her voice.