Buffy Sainte-Marie

[Dave W]

Ever since Sacheen Littlefeather's claimed Indian ancestry was exposed as a lie last year by Native American writer Jacqueline Keeler, I've been following  the exposés of Pretendians, especially in Canada.

Today a CBC show aired an exposé of Buffy Sainte-Marie. After watching it, I'm convinced that she's been deliberately lying about her claimed ancestry for 60 years, to her financial benefit. It's shocking, and what's really appalling are the ugly threats from her attorneys, and her personally in one case.

[uwe]

Alas!, Pretendians and Creetalians ... I watched it all.

My take is:

- Buffy does likely not have Native Canadian DNA in her blood. In something akin to the Stockholm Syndrome she has for whatever reason adapted to/adopted/culturally appropriated an indigenous North American identity. But does not being born as a Native Canadian mean that she cannot now be an accepted member of a Native Canadian tribe? Weren't the Caucasian protagonists in both A Man Called Horse and Dances With Wolves accepted as belonging to the Sioux Nation by born Native Americans by the end of those films? I know, just movies, but I never heard from an Native American that such an assimilation would have been impossible under tribal culture. What I did read a few years ago in connection with another "Pretendian" case from an actual Native American spokesman somewhere in the Southwestern US was that belonging to a Native American/Canadian community is NOT determined by DNA, but by shared culture, practices and values. If that is so, then fine, DNA doesn't count, at least according to the people who identify as Native North Americans.

- Buffy has been a spokes(wo)man for Native American/Native Canadian causes over decades. Is none of that to count anymore because it turns out she was a "Little Wop" and not a "Little Injun"? I have issues with that type of thinking.

- The allegation that she robbed someone with real Native North American DNA of opportunities and fame by taking his/her place is far-fetched. Life doesn't work that way. Buffy didn't buy gasoline cheap because of tribal discounts she was not entitled  to, she built a career based perhaps on an illusion, but it was still her career. And I don't think anyone gave a bison's furry ass that she claimed Native North American ancestry when she submitted "Lift Us Up Where We Belong" as the soapy anthem to a kitschy-reactionary film advocating how only the Marines can turn you into a decent person and how some military base floozies get elevated to be jet pilot officers' wives one day if they just let themselves be humiliated long enough and don't fake pregnancies. Awful movie, awful song, and the worst part is that we all know that set back by a hundred years Zack Mayo would have not flown a plane and shot down commies eventually, but ridden a US Cavalry horse and slaughtered Native Americans. It has always baffled me that Buffy was prepared to give a song for THAT movie.

- I don't voice an opinion on the abuse allegations, but let me say two things: (i) abuse of one daughter (or sister) while the other one remains unscathed (and unknowing) is probably more the norm than the exception in family abuse scenarios, (ii) if anything like that happened (and I'm not saying it did), then Buffy's quest to become an adopted Native North American child rather than the biological child or sibling of her father/brother is hardly a psychological surprise.

***

Buffy wasn't born in a reservation, there is no Native North American blood in her and she fabulated circumstances/incidents indicating otherwise. All of that can be assumed true, yet she can still consider herself and be viewed as part of Native North American culture and heritage. The CBC show would have been much better had it not skipped that salient point completely.

PS: Let's stick with movie scenarios ... Imagine a wagon trek of white settlers massacred and - of course - scalped  by bloodthirsty Injuns. Everyone is killed, but one Indian Brave feels compassion for a blond baby girl wailing in a wagon and takes her home to his Indian Squaw who just lost a child - I SAID THIS IS A MOVIE SCRIPT !  - and they raise her as one of her own. 20 years later she's all beautiful and as her Tipi village gets raided by the US Cavalry she's (once again!) one of the few survivors. The US Cavalry Captain leading the raid, stunned by her flowing blond hair, seeks her out from the prisoners and says: "You're no Injun, you're a white woman, what did those savages do to you?!".

Do you agree with the Captain? CBC does.

[Dave W]

Re your movie script: it happened in real life. Google Quanah Parker.

The show made it clear that she is an accepted member of a tribe (adopted) and that she has championed indigenous causes. But she is definitely not of indigenous blood. The fact is that a good bit of her career is built on false claims.  She took honors she didn't deserve, and that took away from others. It may not be as bad as Carrie Bourassa (mentioned briefly) and others who got tens of thousands in scholarship money, prestigious positions in academia with large salaries and grants, etc. But it's bad. And the threats show how morally lost she is.

[uwe]

If she received any monetary support on the basis of being a born Native North American, then she is no better than a welfare fraud. OTOH, I wonder what these apparently "DNA Indians" are so obsessively digging for if she's indeed an accepted member of a tribe, DNA or no DNA. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery after all.

That said, this whole white (I don't see a lot of Blacks claiming to be part-Red) romanticized yearning for immersion in North American Native culture (prevalent in Germany too) is to me a form of adult escapism and listless search for spirituality. North American Natives were treated horribly by white migrants (that is what they were and nothing else, people tend to forget) and their land was stolen from them (I don't subscribe to the preposterous and convenient views that lack of a nation state organisation or the fact that personal ownership of things is not a focal point of your culture exclude you from having a right to the land you live on, no thank you, Ayn Rand, another migrant btw), but the way their culture and development was, it would have had a hard time surviving against any form of more organized intrusive culture - and if it had been the Egyptians, the Persians, the Romans, the Mongols, the Ottoman Empire, Napoleon or for that matter the Mayas, Incas or Aztecs that had invaded North America. Even without guns, killing off the buffalo or smallpox. You can't turn a whole culture (or several of them) into a protected species and seal it off from the world. People aren't exotic animals and cultures aren't inert. That doesn't mean you get to slaughter them though.

[morrow]

She's done much to espouse native causes. A lot of good work over the years.

I was surprised watching the show last night. But for me it does not diminish what she's accomplished.

[uwe]

Re your movie script: it happened in real life. Google Quanah Parker.

I had no idea, danke!

[Dave W]

I had no idea, danke!

She died of a broken heart.

[Dave W]

Further on the Buffy story:

I started a thread about this at TDPRI. Apparently the thread went off the rails that night and it was deleted. But I did see the first response, from a member who stated that she never misrepresented herself. That's utter bullcrap. For more than half a century, she's represented herself as being born on the Piapot reservation of unknown parents, knowing that it was a lie. Although it's true that she was adopted into the tribe, that doesn't make her indigenous. And does anyone seriously think that she would have been adopted into the tribe if she had told them that she was a Caucasian of Italian/English ancestry?

I got a PM at TDPRI from a member who's an enrolled Cherokee citizen. He believes that the majority of people don't think that fake Indians are a problem and don't like that Indians have protected treaty and legal rights. I agree with him.

I don't believe the story about her brother abusing her, not for one second. She's lied about everything else and threatened retaliation for years, why would anyone believe this could be true? Now, sometimes an abused person doesn't speak up right away, but there's proof that she had a warm relationship many years after the abuse supposedly happened. No way would I ever believe that this happened.

It's a shame because IMHO it overshadows her talent and her good work.

[uwe]

I'm not a Yank, so it's none of my business, Germany has its own ample share of skeletons in the closet, tens of millions of them.

But considering what "you" (= US-Americans with a migratory Caucasian background somewhere in the past, a lot of them ethnic Germans, I'm aware of that) took from North American Indigenous people, a bunch of protected treaty and legal rights for them today have given you on balance one hell of a good deal. Try finding another geographic expanse like North America and, especially, the US of A to take over. In other parts of the world, most Caucasian migrants were eventually evicted from the colonies they conquered, but you guys stayed by sheer numbers and an invasive expansive culture + technology geared toward domination. Tell me when the US is so broke that it can no longer afford special treatment of the few Native Americans "you" have left, I think it will be a while. Until that happens "you" can keep coping with "your" guilt for, say, another 100 or 200 years by granting them a special status that is a much belated pittance of a compensation for what "you" took.

People are so caught up in the here and now that they sometimes miss the historical perspective (not just a US issue I hasten to add). Would have European settlers said "No, thanks, way too expensive, we're going back home then." if the Indigenous People of North America had welcomed them with the comment "You're all free to settle here, that's fine, but in a few hundred years down the line, we'll expect some lucrative gambling casino operation licenses in return after you have killed most of us and relegated our culture to a few reservations!"?

Am I being unreasonable?

PS: Re Buffy, I think she certainly created an image of being bio-indigenous (out of a sense of wishing to belong, is that so terrible?) and I don't have a memory of her stating "According to my birth certificate I'm the biological daughter of my Italian parents, but I always doubted that and believe I was adopted." That would have perhaps been more forthright. A DNA test today could of course answer a lot of questions (last I heard the Cree never invaded Italy), but I understand that at her age and with the activist life she has lived, she perhaps doesn't want that clarity. I respect that. If someone told me today that my daughter or my son weren't co-conceived by me and that I should get a DNA test to prove it, I'd say "Are you out of your frigging mind, why should I care about that?!" I get uneasy with the DNA obsession some of the "true biological" Native North Americans show in that Canadian TV report show: Do we now have Class A and Class B tribe members? Germany's past of biological race determination throws a long shadow with me. The CBC show tried hard to portray the estranged family as being bullied and victimized, it made me wonder what would have needed to have happened in my family if my daughter now went round telling everyone that she's adopted and a descendant of Vietnamese boat people and whether I would really have the urge to "set the record straight" in public. Whiffs très of sublimation to me - from all sides.


Chief Sigmund, no Native American DNA reported, but still a
man of great wisdom and insight.

And I don't think anyone of us can form an informed opinion on whether the abuse allegations are fact or fiction. I'd also caution anyone to jump from "She lied about being Native American." to a convenient "Then she must have lied about being abused too." All liars sometimes tell the truth. And Dave, that's another thing Chief Sigmund would tell you, having an outward "warm relationship" doesn't rule out prior abuse, people come to terms or cope with, suppress and displace the most horrible things. Just watch this movie sometime, very thought-provoking.



(Without spoiling too much, Laura Dern plays a woman who as a very young teen was sexually groomed and abused by a (not related to her) attractive couple, but she has stored it away as "I was almost a full-grown woman at that point and wanted it too."-Lolita type incident because she just won't allow herself to be a victim. The movie recounts how in fact she was - visibly - still a child back then and how her sexual encounter was not co-spawned by any budding adolescent sexual inquisitiveness on her part, it was forced on her. The film contrasts how she really looked and acted back then i.e. what really happened with her false memories of it.)


That said, if Buffy was abused as a child by her Caucasian relatives then that might give her motivation to long for a Native American ancestry, but it would not make her any more or any less an "Indian".

PPS: You're not alone, Dave, Edith agrees with you that Buffy's a sham re the assumed ancestry and denying her true own.

[Dave W]

Well, I'm happy that Edith agrees with me.

There's no way Buffy Sainte-Marie could ever convince me that she was abused.

Those you call "true biological" Native North Americans aren't obsessed with DNA, They accept enrolled tribal members unless there's reason to believe that they achieved that status by fraud, or that they're lying about being enrolled.

IMHO Pretendians cause real harm. It's good that Jacqueline Keeler and others are rooting them out.

[uwe]

I will from here on now identify as a Led Zeppelin fan.

What is and what has always been ...

[uwe]

PS: Is Francesca Cree too?

[morrow]

I found this interesting.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/663419805777170

[uwe]

What is she saying? I'm not on facebook, so I can't hear the audio.

*******

"It's not the full story," another resident told CTV News, when asked about the CBC documentary. "So for me, my prayer is for the family that have claimed Buffy."

Many online are taking Sainte-Marie's side, adding to the debate about "Pretendians" and cultural appropriation.

"There's basically two camps," a Regina resident told CTV News.

"Some people entirely defending Buffy and another group that are really upset with her and they feel betrayed."

Is it still possible in this day and age of extreme positions to neither "defend her entirely" nor be "really upset and feel betrayed"? I think it's unfortunate that she felt the need to, uhum, embellish her CV, not exactly role model behavior for anyone nor for the cause. But is it beyond comprehension and a look into the moral abyss of human depravation?


(furtively) Are jokes still allowed?

Meanwhile new details pertaining to
Buffy's true ancestry have come to
light ...

[Ken]

Has Big Bird chimed in on the matter?