Buffy Sainte-Marie – Missing Mom

In September of 2021, I wrote a blog about LINK>Adoptee – Buffy Sainte-Marie. In The Guardian, there is a new article about her as she LINK>denies allegations that she misled the public about her Indigenous ancestry.

Her response to these allegations seems honest for any adoptee – “I have always struggled to answer questions about who I am. Through that research what became clear, and what I’ve always been honest about, is that I don’t know where I’m from or who my birth parents were, and I will never know.”

blogger’s note – My mom had much the same perspective. She had her parents’ names as Mr & Mrs JC Moore. Not a lot to go on. The state of Tennessee refused her request to release her adoption file – a file I now have plus black and white photos of my mom and her mom the last time they were together.

In a recent interview, Buffy Sainte-Marie noted that – “As adopted children, we don’t even know when our birthday is. You spend your entire life asking questions you can’t answer.” blogger’s note – In fact, my mom’s birth date had even been changed when her birth certificate was reissued as though she had been born to her adoptive parents.

Eventually, Sainte-Marie was accepted by the Piapot First Nation and given a Cree name – Piyasees Kanikamut, which means ‘Singing Bird’.

The tribe has come to her defense saying that questions over Sainte-Marie’s ancestry were “hurtful, ignorant, colonial – and racist”. Adding “No one, including Canada and its governments, the Indian Act, institutions, media or any person anywhere can deny our family’s inherent right to determine who is a member of our family and community.”

Though she has retired from live performances, due to health issues, she has long been known as a fierce advocate of Indigenous peoples and a key figure in social justice movements. “Buffy has lived her life as an Indigenous woman, and as such, has experienced all of the ‘lived experience’ that goes along with it- the good and the painful. What is gained by targeting her at this age?” wrote Robyn Michaud, an Indigenous studies professor at Conestoga College. “My heart hurts.”

My photo of her comes from an NPR story about her LINK>”Authorized Biography” which was co-authored with Andrea Warner. It is said that her biography serves as a Map of Hope.

There is no single story about Buffy Sainte-Marie’s adoption. One finds that her parents died suddenly, or that she was abandoned, or that her adoption was a kinship type. What is known is that she was adopted by Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie, a couple of Mi’kmaq descent, in Wakefield Massachusetts.

“In Canada, we had something that, sometimes, a little bit later referred to as the Big Scoop. But it had been going on for generations, where native children were removed from the home for their own good. But what happens to children who are kind of lost in the system like that, they’re assigned a birthday (she doesn’t actually know her exact birthdate). They’re assigned kind of a biography. So, in many cases, adoptive people don’t really know what the true story is.”
~ Buffy Sainte-Marie

She was born in 1941 on the Piapot 75 reserve in the Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, Canada. Sainte-Marie began researching her Indigenous heritage in her teens and making trips back to the Piapot reserve and connecting with her Cree community. In 1964, on a return trip to the Piapot Cree reserve in Canada for a powwow, she was welcomed and (in a Cree Nation context) adopted by the youngest son of Chief Piapot, Emile Piapot and his wife, Clara Starblanket Piapot.

Of her adoptive parents, she says – “For the most part, they were wonderful. There were some terrible predators in the neighborhood, and some bully predators in the house.” When asked if her mother noticed anything, she says – “Well, I thought I was telling her what was going on. But little girls don’t have names for what big boys do to them. We don’t have that language, and we certainly didn’t during the ’40s. My mom would say, has he been teasing you again? So I thought that’s what it was called. It is not something that has become my main story. My story is about getting beyond that.”

As a child from an abusive childhood, as a person who was abused by boyfriends and spouses, there’s another kind of song that she writes which she calls empowerment songs. Sainte-Marie set out to address the problem she saw in Indian country, where Indian kids would graduate from high school, want to go to college, but didn’t know how to negotiate the path to college. They didn’t know how to get a scholarship, they weren’t connected by family and friends. She founded the Nihewan Foundation which gave law school scholarships to Native Americans. She says that her biggest honor was to find out that two of her early scholarship recipients had gone on to found tribal colleges.

Some content comes from an NPR interview and some from 75 Things You Need To Know About Buffy Sainte-Marie.