The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s unassailably factual revelation that singer Buffy St Marie is a fraud who lied for 60 years about her Native American heritage is the single most spectacular entry in folk music’s long, bizarre history of self-made bullshit artists.
First published October 27 (and glaringly under-reported here) the CBC’s scrupulously researched story (and accompanying documentary) stirred up a toxic cultural confection of hard-earned, richly deserved condemnation spiced with equal measures of appallingly delusional defenses from both the singer herself and a cadre of dizzy, deep in-denial supporters unable to accept the factual truth.
Crowing bizarre conspiratorial claims, citing the Piapot First Nation’s purely ceremonial “adoption” of the singer as an unquestionable refutation of genetic reality, crying [shock!] racism, calling the CBC story a “hit piece” or “an attack on her ancestry” and carving torturously elaborate allowances for “her truth” citing tribal adoptions from the 17th century(!), the pro-St. Marie tribe is frothing with indignant rationalizations.
These frantic, blind-eye defenses reveal much about the charged socio-cultural atmosphere surrounding Indigenous Canadians, a community mostly sick and tired of what they characterize as Pretendian hijinks and who have recently been subjected to some hurtful, elaborate and highly charged hoaxery (after Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir falsely claimed the remains of 215 indigenous children had been found in a mass grave—a lie). It’s an insult to injury scenario of monumental proportions and St. Marie’s contemptible contribution is almost as insanely unnecessary and damaging as Casmir’s.
Long acclaimed as folk music’s premier and primary Native American artist, St. Marie’s whipped up a dizzyingly contradictory and haphazard concoction of willful deceit, conveniently bolstered by the absurd foundational claim that “she didn’t know who she was or where she came from” AKA “my story as I know it.” St. Marie crawled so far out on the shaky limb of a non-existent family tree that she alone made this ignominious fall inevitable.
The multiple layers of contradictory and increasingly unlikely claims the singer has spouted over the years border on the chaotic. Statements regarding her origin have been whiplash worthy; she was born either Cree, Mi’kmaq or Algonquin (depending on how the wind blew that day) and has leap-frogged from “I don’t know who my real mother was,” to asserting her mother died giving birth to her, or that her mother was killed in a car accident—increasingly sinister claims that climaxed with the woeful tale of being forcibly taken from her family during the Canuck Fed’s infamous ‘Scoop’ program (which allowed child welfare agencies to arbitrarily place indigenous children in adoptive white homes and residential schools).
Here, St. Marie sank to a new, emotionally exploitive low, pitching a particularly onerous falsity that’s enraged many of the Native Canadians whose ongoing class action suit against the government thus far has 21,188 approved claims. "They've been through some really terrible things,” Scoop subject Kamao Cappo told CBC. “And now this just rubs salt in the wounds."
The fruits of St. Marie’s fraud run the gamut from being named Billboard’s 1964 Best New Artist to the becoming first Indigenous person to nab an Oscar as co-writer of dreadful pop-dross ear-Kinzhal “Up Where We Belong” from An Officer and a Gentleman. She’s also the recipient of numerous Indigenous music awards, bestowal of which was frequently based on her completely fake Canadian citizenship, multiple Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, Aboriginal Peoples’ Choice Music Awards, four Indigenous lifetime achievement awards and the same number of CARAS-issued Junos designated for Indigenous people. The fat, shiny cherry on top of these was 2021’s St. Marie commemorative postage stamp, the jewel in her lavishly adorned crown of specious, undeserved honors, and the gleeful gloating over this particular fake-out must’ve run soul deep.
In today’s overheated climate, where a child’s Pocahontas Halloween costume evokes fiery condemnation, St. Marie’s case is deliciously, er, “problematic.” The engineering of it all is fascinating—purportedly she owns more than a few tanning booths but what did she use back in the early 60s, when, as she told NYT, she aspired “to become the best Indian girl singer there is?” Pancake #31? Miracle Touch Creamy Blush? Dried, crushed cranberries?
Taken in context, St. Marie is a classic folk revival tradition bearer, as deception, fiction and overbaked hubris have always been calling cards for the genre’s biggest stars, the self-propelled, total phonies Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. In the extreme case of St. Marie, the core is issue is the frightening, pathetic pathology which enabled her to create, uphold and now desperately cling to this malignant fantasy.
What was the initial motivation? A sense of inadequacy, a teenage whim, some twisted in-joke, an easy way out from humdrum life as a standard issue (to use the parlance of the day) white chick?
It’s one thing for 14-year-old Elliot Adnopaz (AKA Ramblin’ Jack Elliot) to run away from his opulently bourgy Brooklyn home to join the rodeo and pretend he was a cowboy—that’s a common, age-appropriate fantasy. But for well-fed, moon-faced Glee & Pep clubber Beverly St. Marie to switch from aspiring stewardess to donning redface and storming down the warpath of total, immersive racial piracy is far more excessive and perverse.
Draping herself with the infamous, historic wounds of the disgracefully wronged and oppressed Native American—and exploiting that for personal gain—is a wholly aberrant pursuit that surpasses cold, calculating cynicism and crashes into a territory of grave disorder.
To assume that she just went blithely ahead with no self-awareness of the cultural ramifications is beyond disingenuous. There’s a warped criminality to the charade that cannot be ignored. This prideful type of human nature thrives on the sheer elation of getting one over on the suckers, and St. Marie lived and breathed this; the lowest form of emotional chicanery became her meat and in order, to pull it off, she doubtless damn well relished each and every moment of it for over 60 years.
As the CBC reported, the Pretendian phenom has earned close, scholarly scrutiny; “They’ve all become stars in their field,” said Jean Teillet, whose 2022 “Indigenous Identity Fraud” is the first comprehensive study of the field. “They’re taking that opportunity from a real Indigenous person…. It’s prestige, it’s money, it’s grants and awards and positions and work that they would never have gotten otherwise.”
Perhaps the most tragically amusing aspect of St. Marie’s masquerade is that all of it was completely unnecessary. The singer-songwriter was as ably capable as any of her contemporaries, and St. Marie’s hand in “Up Where We Belong” betrays a shrewd Diane Warren-worthy understanding of that particularly guileful schmaltz which guarantees to platinum success.
If nothing else, St. Marie is a natural-born marketing whiz, and the tragedy that she opted for redface freakshow rather that straight musical hit-making hints at something far more shadowy and iniquitous. Reportedly shrouded in seclusion at her home in Hawaii, and garnering tortuous support of this hopelessly convoluted nature (Is she perpetuating “colonial violence?” Is she “violating Treaty responsibility?”) it appears unlikely that we’ll ever find out.
Buffy St Marie and Iron Eyes Cody. Man does that shit hurt. I'm sure poor Deborah Iyall is getting an unnecessary once over by the "looking for chizme" fake journals brigade as we speak.
Superbly written, much appreciation.