Buffy Sainte-Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie (born February 20, 1941, Stoneham, Massachusetts, U.S.) is an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, political activist, and visual artist known especially for her use of music to promote awareness of issues affecting Native Americans. Since the early 1960s Sainte-Marie has claimed to have Indigenous ancestry and to have been born on the Piapot Reserve near Craven, Saskatchewan, Canada, but a 2023 episode of The Fifth Estate, a long-running investigative TV program on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), offered evidence that she was born in the United States to parents of European descent.

Early life and breakthrough

The circumstances of Sainte-Marie’s birth and early childhood have been called into question by The Fifth Estate’s investigation. Although she has said that she was born on a reservation in Canada, she has also told varying stories about what followed. Sainte-Marie has alleged that she was orphaned as an infant in Canada when her mother, a Plains Cree, died. At other times she has described being taken from her family during the Sixties Scoop, an era between 1951 and about 1990 when Canadian authorities on a large scale removed Indigenous children from their communities, often without the consent of their guardians, and put them into the welfare system. Many of these children were subsequently adopted by non-Indigenous families in Canada or the United States. Sainte-Marie said that as an infant she had been adopted by an American couple, Albert and Winifred Santamaria, whom she claimed were of Mi’kmaq ancestry. However, The Fifth Estate pointed out that the Sixties Scoop began in 1951, 10 years after Sainte-Marie’s birth, meaning that she could not have been taken from her family and adopted as an infant during that era of mass removal. Moreover, the documents obtained by The Fifth Estate included Sainte-Marie’s original birth certificate, which cast doubt on much of her early history. It showed that Albert and Winifred Santamaria, whom she claimed were her adoptive parents, were actually her biological parents. The certificate also stated that she had been born in Stoneham, Massachusetts, U.S., not on a reservation in Canada.

During World War II the Santamaria family began using the last name Sainte-Marie because of anti-Italian sentiment, and Beverly Santamaria thus became Beverly Sainte-Marie. She was raised in Massachusetts and played piano as a young child. As a teenager she took up guitar and started composing her own songs. After completing high school, she attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she studied philosophy with an Asian focus and education. She received a bachelor’s degree in 1962. Sainte-Marie began performing her songs in coffeehouses during her college years, and after graduation she moved to New York City to take part in the bohemian arts scene of Greenwich Village.

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During the summer of 1962 Sainte-Marie attended a powwow on Manitoulin Island, Ontario. There she met Emile Piapot of the Piapot First Nation. He and his wife, Clara Starblanket, had a daughter who had been taken from them about the time Sainte-Marie had been born, and a friend suggested that the singer may be related to the couple. The Piapots therefore recognized Sainte-Marie as kin, and she told the Boston Herald the following year, “I’m a recognized member of the reservation now.”

Sainte-Marie’s breakthrough came in 1963, when critic Robert Shelton of The New York Times praised her as “one of the most promising new talents on the folk scene.” The review led to a contract with Vanguard Records and to the release of her first album, It’s My Way! (1964). The recording contained a number of songs that became stylistic benchmarks in the development of her musical corpus. “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone” addressed Native American land rights and intercultural relationships. The song featured Sainte-Marie’s distinctive tremolo vocal technique, which is often attributed to the influence of Native American powwow singing but which may also reflect Sainte-Marie’s acknowledged identification with the French singer Edith Piaf, whose vocal style was marked by a similar warbling quality. “Cod’ine,” which was based on Sainte-Marie’s addiction to codeine during treatment for bronchial pneumonia, conveyed a warning about the perils of substance dependency.

“Cripple Creek” features Sainte-Marie singing and intermittently playing a Native American musical bow—specifically, a mouth bow, so called because it uses the mouth as a resonator; by plucking the single string of the bow, holding it to the mouth, and strategically varying the shape of the mouth cavity, different overtones are emphasized to yield a distinct melody. The mouth bow ultimately became a trademark of Sainte-Marie’s performances. Her song “Universal Soldier” arose as an anti-Vietnam War anthem not only through her own performances but also through cover recordings and performances by Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan.

Sainte-Marie’s second release, Many a Mile (1965), contained “Until It’s Time for You to Go,” a love song covered by a number of singers including, among others, Bobby Darin, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, and Elvis Presley. Other important songs and albums of the 1960s included “My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying,” a poignant commentary on the exclusion of Native Americans from mainstream American history, from Little Wheel Spin and Spin (1966); and Illuminations (1969), notable for its use of electronically synthesized and manipulated instrumental and vocal sounds and for its quadraphonic recording technology. In the 1970s she contributed the title song to the film Soldier Blue (1970) and released three more albums—Buffy (1974), Changing Woman (1975), and Sweet America (1976)—before taking a break from recording that lasted some 15 years.

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Activism

Although Sainte-Marie’s recording hiatus coincided with the birth of her first child, Dakota Starblanket Wolfchild, she also had declined in popularity—perhaps as a result of her political outspokenness. She championed a variety of political causes during the 1960s and ’70s, most notably the American Indian Movement—the militant civil rights organization that took over Alcatraz Island between 1969 and 1971—and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Sainte-Marie held that her association with such movements led to her being blacklisted by the Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon administrations, which severely limited her ability to receive radio airplay and secure performance engagements.

Throughout her career Sainte-Marie was a staunch advocate of education both for and about the Native American community. In that capacity she founded the Nihewan Foundation for American Indian Education (later called the Nihewan Foundation for Native American Education) in 1969, and from 1976 to 1981 she was a member of the cast of the children’s educational television series Sesame Street, where she sought to raise awareness of the presence and vibrancy of Native American cultures in contemporary society. In the mid-1990s she established the Cradleboard Teaching Project, which facilitated educational partnerships—typically over long distances—between Native and non-Native American communities and promoted development of culturally sensitive school curricula. Meanwhile, in the 1980s she began to create, exhibit, and teach computer-based visual art at various venues across North America.

Later career

Although Sainte-Marie did not release any new recordings between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, she continued to compose music. The song “Up Where We Belong” was among her most successful works of that period. Cowritten with Jack Nitzsche, her husband at the time, and Will Jennings and recorded by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes for the film An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), the song reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and won numerous awards, including an Academy Award for best original song in 1983.

In 1992 Sainte-Marie returned to recording her own music. She released the album Coincidence (and Likely Stories) (1992), which featured the pointed political commentary “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” as well as a new version of “Starwalker” (originally released in 1976) that incorporated samples from the Ironwood Singers, a highly regarded Northern Plains powwow drum group. She followed that album with Up Where We Belong (1996), an album that, most significantly, contained her own first recording of the award-winning title song. Sainte-Marie continued to compose and record music, produce artwork, and engage in various advocacy and educational activities in the early 21st century. In 2008 she released Running for the Drum, an album of almost entirely new songs, and her eclectic album Power in the Blood (2015) was awarded the 2015 Polaris Music Prize for best Canadian album of the year. Medicine Songs, a collection of new and reworked older songs that fit her activist vision, appeared in 2017. She later released a children’s book based on a song of the same name, Hey Little Rockabye: A Lullaby for Pet Adoption (2020).

Claims of Indigenous identity fraud

In 2023 Sainte-Marie announced that she would no longer be performing live, citing health concerns. Several months later The Fifth Estate broadcast its findings about Sainte-Marie’s claims of Indigenous ancestry. The program corroborated the information on her birth certificate with such documents as Sainte-Marie’s marriage certificate to Nitzsche. That filing, which she signed, states that she was born in Massachusetts to Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie on February 20, 1941. The Fifth Estate also reported that members of Sainte-Marie’s family had refuted her claims of Indigenous ancestry as early as 1964.

The program also spoke to Métis lawyer Jean Teillet, who highlighted the ways in which Indigenous identity fraud can take opportunities and honors away from legitimate Indigenous people. Indeed, Sainte-Marie has received a number of accolades designated for those with Indigenous ancestry, including four Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, two Aboriginal Peoples’ Choice Music Awards, four Juno Awards intended for Indigenous people, and four Indigenous lifetime achievement awards. She has also been considered the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar (1983) and has been named a Companion of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honor. The latter recognition was rescinded in 2025.

In response to The Fifth Estate episode Sainte-Marie issued a statement saying that the program relied on a narrative invented by her elder brother, Alan Sainte-Marie, whom she says physically and sexually abused her when they were children, as well as on members of her estranged family whom she does not know. Relatives of Emile Piapot also released a statement, which called the allegations of fraud “hurtful, ignorant, colonial—and racist.”