Buffy Saint-Marie performs on the Americana Music Honors and Awards present in 2015, in Nashville, Tenn.
Mark Zaleski/AP
conceal caption
toggle caption
Mark Zaleski/AP
The Canadian authorities has stripped Buffy Sainte-Marie of one of many nation’s highest honors, after a 2023 information report discovered she had fabricated claims of Indigenous ancestry.
The Oscar-winning singer’s Order of Canada termination was publicly shared on Saturday within the Canadian authorities’s official on-line publication, the Canada Gazette. Canada’s governor basic, Mary Simon, signed off on the motion on Jan. 3, in line with the discover.
In an electronic mail to NPR, a consultant from Simon’s workplace stated the governor basic “doesn’t touch upon the specifics of termination circumstances.”
However the authorities’s termination policy states its selections are, “based mostly on proof and guided by the precept of equity and shall solely be made after the Council has ascertained the information it considers related.”
Greatest identified for her 1964 anti-war anthem “Common Soldier,” and for co-writing the Academy Award-winning music “Up The place We Belong,” Sainte-Marie acquired the Order of Canada in 1997 for her companies to Indigenous Canadians. In line with the entry about her within the Canadian Encylopedia, Sainte-Marie has recognized as Cree from the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan for the reason that early Nineteen Sixties and has lengthy been acknowledged as a serious Indigenous artist.
The singer informed NPR in 1988 that she didn’t see different folks musicians addressing Indigenous points when she first received into the music enterprise. “It was not solely my contribution to an ignorant world of people that may wish to know, but it surely was additionally an actual try to alter issues, to bridge the hole between Indian individuals and the remainder of the world,” Sainte-Marie stated.
However a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation investigation in 2023 shed doubt on the singer’s claims of Indigenous ancestry. The crew stated it tracked down the performer’s American beginning certificates, which acknowledged she was born Beverly Jean Santamaria, in Massachusetts, to white dad and mom.
Sainte-Marie defended herself in a video statement she posted on social media on the time.
“My rising up mother, who was proud to be half Mi’kmaq, informed me many issues, together with that I used to be adopted and that I used to be native,” Sainte-Marie stated. “ And later in life, as an grownup, she additionally informed me some issues that I’ve by no means shared out of respect for her. That I hate sharing now, together with that I’ll have been born on the unsuitable facet of the blanket.”
The singer additionally stated she’d all the time been trustworthy about not understanding some particulars about her roots. “I do not know the place I am from, who my beginning dad and mom are, or how I ended up a misfit in a typical white, Christian, New England city,” she stated.
In line with the Order of Canada website, since its inception in 1967, the distinction has been bestowed upon greater than 7,600 individuals. “The Order of Canada is how our nation honours individuals who make extraordinary contributions to the nation,” the web site states.
Representatives for Sainte-Marie didn’t instantly reply to NPR’s requests for remark.
