On October 27, the CBC’s investigative documentary program, The Fifth Estate, released an episode probing the background of singer, activist, and Canadian icon Buffy Sainte-Marie. Sainte-Marie, now eighty-two, has long claimed that she was born on the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan and adopted by a white American family. But the CBC investigation convincingly concludes that she was born in Massachusetts to Italian American parents and, as her career blossomed and then flourished through the 1970s and onward, went to great lengths to conceal these origins in order to become one of the world’s most famous and beloved Indigenous icons.
Sainte-Marie’s accomplishments are long. She was the first Indigenous person to win an Academy Award, in 1983; she has received fourteen honorary doctorates, six Juno Awards, a Golden Globe, and a Governor General’s Award; and she is an officer of the Order of Canada. Perhaps most broadly impactful were her appearances on Sesame Street, beginning in 1975, in which she shared and celebrated Cree culture in front of North American audiences.
