The 85 year old singer, who was the first indigenous person to win an Oscar (for co-writing “Up Where We Belong” in 1983), was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Toronto in 2019.
From the link:
Reading further into the article, this is the second honorary degree to be revoked. Dalhousie University took similar action in January after a Mi’kmaw student questioned her background.
Sainte-Marie has been awarded around 15 honorary degrees over the years. No info on whether any others would be revoked.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. It seems to me that a degree, even an honorary one, should be awarded based on a person’s achievements and accomplishments, not on their national or ethnic background.
Are the degrees being revoked just because she misrepresented herself, or were they awarded “for” having a certain identity which it turns out she doesn’t have?
She’s a fraud. She lied for decades. I see no problem with revoking the honor just like for any heinous act that may or may not be related to the honor
I think most people would agree that Black and Indigenous people in North America have some very complicated issues attached to their “national or ethnic background”, though. Witness the reaction to Rachel Dolezal, for instance. I don’t think Sainte-Marie or Dolezal would have had the same backlash if they had been claiming to be Croatian.
To me, it seems Ike the non-military equivalent of stolen valor.
Now, in fairness (and I’ll admit that I haven’t looked into this), it’s conceivable - no matter how unlikely - that she was unaware of the discrepancy. She may have been told as a child that she was Indigenous, and never looked into it for itself.
As I said, it’s unlikely. And, while anecdotes don’t equal data, I had something kinda similar happen to me. I have a very German last name. I never really thought about it, but as an adult, I learned that my name should not be German. The story goes that, when my great-grandmother divorced her husband, she didn’t want him to be able to find her, so rather than go back to her maiden name, or keep his, so she taught my grandfather when he was a boy to spell the last name incorrectly.
When she did that, she changed the derivation of my modern-day last name. The spelling she married into was actually Dutch. But by changing one letter, it became a German name, and I have no German blood in me.
So it’s possible that something similar happened, though I doubt it.
It seems like most of these honors are being rescinded because they are reserved for Canadians. Young entertainers of her generation often misrepresented their backgrounds or their managers did for them. The extraordinary thing here is that it endured for so long and that Sainte-Marie so thoroughly embraced it. She may have even convinced herself that it was true (her story is that she was told she was taken from her First Nation parents and adopted by the Sainte-Marie’s when she was two.)
BSM’s whole schtick was being indigenous. The “native” identity that she concocted is the thing that she’s famous for. It’s her whole persona. She never did anything as Buffy Sainte-Marie, she did it as BSM the NATIVE AMERICAN.
She also represented herself as a spokesperson for Native American issues.
I was a kid in her heyday, but I remember her. She was on Sesame Street, not so much when I watched it, but when my younger brother did, so I saw a lot of her on it. She used it as a platform to teach about Native American cultures and issues, and did so as “The first Indigenous person to be a member of the cast.” She even stated her purpose was to show children that “Indians still exist.”
FTR: I saw her perform once, and it was weird, for reasons I won’t go into, because it would probably hijack the thread. But I had liked her as a child, and she lost my respect after that performance.
The link says she had received honorary recognition for “her contributions to music, the arts and social advocacy”.
Either they were fake contributions, or they were real but recognition is being repudiated due to her being sketchy/turpid from day zero in the first place?
Her brother and uncle called her out over fifty years ago. She is 100% a fraud.
From wikipedia:
Some members of the Sainte-Marie family clarified her ancestry in the 1960s and 1970s.[71] In December 1964, Arthur Santamaria, Sainte-Marie’s uncle, wrote in the Wakefield Daily Item that Sainte-Marie “has no Indian blood” and “not a bit” of Cree heritage.[71] Her brother, Alan Sainte-Marie, also wrote to newspapers, including the Denver Post in 1972, that his sister was not born on a reservation but was the child of Caucasian parents, and that “to associate her with the Indian and to accept her as his spokesman is wrong”.[71]
Alan Sainte-Marie’s daughter Heidi stated in 1975 that when her father met Buffy and a producer for Sesame Street while working as a commercial pilot, the producer had asked him if he was Indigenous. Alan Sainte-Marie clarified that they were all of European ancestry.[71] On November 7, 1975, Alan Sainte-Marie received a letter from a law firm representing Buffy Sainte-Marie that read: “We have been advised that you have without provocation disparaged and perhaps defamed Buffy and maliciously interfered with her employment opportunities.” The letter also stated that no expense would be spared in pursuing legal remedies.[71] Included with the letter was a handwritten note from Buffy Sainte-Marie to her brother threatening to publicly accuse him of sexually abusing her as a child if he spoke further about her ancestry.[71] She made her first appearance on Sesame Street one month later.[71]
Honorary degrees are given because universities want people to be associated with the universities. Sometimes it’s mainly to procure them as speakers for a graduation or other ceremony-- they come for the degree, and get to wear the robes, caps and other decorations of their degree-- which BTW, is a doctorate, but not a PhD (I hear them referred to as honorary PhDs sometimes).
If a university wants to disassociate itself from someone it previously valued, stripping them of the degree is a good way to do it.
This whole story is weird to me. I know her name. I was born in 1973, so I seem to have missed her heyday, or at least wasn’t quite old enough to understand it.
And, for the record, @RivkahChaya , I won’t consider it a hijack if you decide to relay the story. I’m genuinely curious about it, but respect your decision if you opt not to tell us.
This is all very sad for me, and especially for my 19-year-old folkie self who owned several of her albums and saw her perform at Carnegie Hall (front row!).
She taunted the audience, let’s say-- she started playing the theme to Sesame Street, for example, and when the audience began singing it, she stopped, and said “You don’t know what I’m going to do.” There were several instances of that “vibe,” or whatever-- it seemed like exactly the opposite way to handle an audience. There was a whole “I don’t like you as much as you like me” thing. And she was inappropriately sexual as well.
That is true; however universities can and do award honorary doctorates in philosophy, or honorary doctorates of science, for outstanding scientific work in an appropriate doctoral subject; why would they not? Whereas Bob Dylan is an honorary Doctor of Music [or was it an honorary DMA? I have not seen the “official” certificate; it is all academic frippery when you get down to it], etc.
I’m very much a believer that art is art and stands or falls on its own merits, separate from the artist. A good song is still good even when the songwriter or performer is problematic. I’m also very uncomfortable with the notion that a writer/singer/etc’s ethnicity affects the “value” of the art they create.
But there’s a big difference between being a liar and/or a fantasist (and possibly delusional) and building your whole career based on an identity that is fictional. If that fictional identity is front and centre of the art, not incidental to it, then it very much does matter that it’s fictional.
She’s as much an Indian as Chief Jay Strongbow and Iron Eyes Cody. Captain Lou Albano said that Strongbow was a member of the Woppaho tribe. And, heck, many of us USAians have been told we were partly indigenous, but DNA and family research have shown otherwise.
This is a toughie. She’s a talented singer and songwriter — AND she’s done legitimate work to help indigenous communities over the years. And, that tribe in Saskatchewan appreciates all this, and the real connection she had has with them since 1964 — when, as a 23-year-old up-and-coming folk singer, she had a real “welcome to our family” cultural experience with them.
The problem is that, in the years that followed, she publicly forged a false identity as a GENETIC Indian, rather than a helpful advocate and cultural fellow-traveler. She happened to look the part, more or less. (Surely, she wouldn’t have gone down this path, were she blonde). This clearly helped her career — or at least she thought it did, as that threatening letter to her brother just before her Sesame Street job attests.
It’s unfortunate. She could have done what (say) Ry Cooder did for Cuban musical culture in Buena Vista Social Club (there are better analogies than this, but it’s the first one I thought of). As I said above, it’s her incidental resemblance to certain indigenous American peoples that sealed her fate. I bet it all started when she was mistaken by someone for a genetic Indian during or just after that 1964 cultural experience.
I think that most modern Americans do have some trace of native ancestry, but it’s often far back enough that any genetic evidence would be lost in the noise. In general, if someone says “My grandma told us that we’re part Cherokee, five generations back”, or the like, there’s no real reason to doubt them.
Of course, there’s a big difference between “I’ve heard that one of my great^4 grandmothers was Native American” (even if it happens to be true) and “I’ve lived my whole life immersed in the culture and society of my people” (even if there’s no direct blood connection to that people).