2 important considerations:1. Can we trust birth certificates? "A lawyer for Sainte-Marie told the CBC that many adoption records had been destroyed by Canadian governments and that children adopted in Massachusetts were commonly issued new birth certificates. 'Sainte-Marie is entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy about her personal genealogical and family history,' the lawyer, Josephine de Whytell, told the CBC."
2. Do genetics matter when the question is membership in a political group that maintains its own standards and procedures? "After growing up in Massachusetts, Sainte-Marie was adopted by the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan, where she says she was born. In a statement, two members of the tribe, Debra and Ntawnis Piapot, said.... 'We claim her as a member of our family and all of our family members are from the Piapot First Nation. To us that holds far more weight than any paper documentation or colonial record keeping ever could.'"
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87 comments:
Her brother threatened to out her. She replied by threating to say he sexually abused her as a child.
A DNA test would prove that she was adopted. But I doubt that she will take one.
Birth certificates have come down in the world since 2008.
Let the purity-testing commence!
I was born a poor black child : )
But seriously, if the tribe says she's one of them, who am I to argue?
Do genetics matter when the question is membership in a political group that maintains its own standards and procedures?
I was listening to a podcast in which a native woman was talking about "Pretendians." In the course of the conversation, she mentioned that American tribes, at least, reject genetic analysis. For instance, they are frequently approached by Ancestry.com and such places to donate DNA samples so that people can find out whether they have native ancestry, and they refuse - but it's the reason for refusing that I think is so nuts. It's because to donate DNA samples would be just another example of the colonizers' stealing from them.
The problem I see is that you can't have it both ways; you can't say that you have to prove your native ancestry AND that you can't trust the trappings of the "white man's" society (like records) AND that you can't use your own genetic code to do the proving.
Is this going to be the start of transracialism? If there weren't a social advantage to belonging to some identity group - functionally a "grievance group" - there'd probably be a lot less of people's trying to belong to some identity group.
Now the new jargon is "Indigenous peoples". Sorry white Americans who have been here since 1609 are indigenous too.
Call them Indians, or Native americans. Or Commanders.
"Can we trust birth certificates?" Now do Barack Hussein Obama. :)
"Sainte-Marie was adopted by the Piapot First Nation..."
Seems to me that's all that should be required. You're a member of the tribe if the tribe says so. This is quite different from the case of other Pretendians like Elizabeth Warren, who never had any connection whatsoever to native culture or institutions.
And why should the standards be higher for ethnicity than for gender? Buffy could declare herself a man and it would be a hate crime to disagree.
"But seriously, if the tribe says she's one of them, who am I to argue?"
If her claimed membership in the tribe conveys some special advantage over others not members, then of course you have standing to argue about it. And until the law eliminates all of the encrusted layers of special legal racial privilege (a result that is uncertain but at least many years or decades in the future), then this is what we'll have: endless disputes about who is what racially, like Elizabeth Warren's pretend Cherokee blood, which got her all sorts of special treatment in academia. It is, to put it mildly, unseemly.
Joe Smith said...
"If the tribe says she's one of them, who am I to argue?"
That's where I am, too. Plus, why bring this up now? I haven't heard her name in decades.
Well, this would certainly open up my opportunities on the 'reparations' front. Time to get crackin' on my resumé.
You're going to get a lot of commentators who make the usual, lazy points about Elizabeth Warren et al. But honestly the story here is (if anything) the investigators' incompetence. The fact that the investigators didn't know about point #1 -- that birth certificates are *re-written* during infant adoptions -- is enough to make the investigation garbage. They don't even know the basic lay of the land. How are they supposed to inform us about something concerning which they know so little?
After the Russian Revolution quite a large number of upper middle class Russians fudged their histories and their papers to make it appear that they were members of the proletariat. Some of them later got denounced, but I've read that many of the higher functionaries of the Soviet Union came from bourgeois backgrounds. Many of the original Bolsheviks such as Lenin and Trotsky also came from privileged backgrounds.....People who achieve some success in life also have some success in raising their children to be successful. Sometimes their ambitious kids want to be revolutionaries and sometimes they want to be indigenous Americans or football players. Whatever. They've learned discipline and focus from their parents. Plus, to be the kind of indigenous American who can sing the songs that appeal to middle class whites, it helps to be a middle class white.
I read the whole article. The evidence concerning the Mass birth certificate is conclusive; the suggestion that it merely papered over an adoption from Canada completely debunked.
If you read the article, there's no question that her supposed Indian heritage is a complete fabrication. The fact that, much later in life (and after she became famous), the Piapots accepted her as sort of an adopted daughter doesn't change the fact that she is an Italian-American born in Mass. to two white birth parents.
Sainte-Marie .. Saskatchewan, where she says she was born.
So, according to HER.. How did she get from Saskatchewan to Boston? i ASSUME that her poor mother, that couldn't afford milk; bought her a plane ticket?
Oh! i see! The CANADIAN Government, during "the Sixties Scoop!" of course..
kinda weird that Despite its name referencing the 1960s, the Sixties Scoop began in the mid-to-late 1950s
by weird, i mean; the Buffster was born February 20, 1941..
So in "the mid-to-late 1950's, she would have been AT LEAST fourteen* (1955-1941 == 14)
SO.. while in her mid teens, the Canadian Government flew her ACROSS the NORTH AMERICAN CONTINENT!
To ANOTHER fricking Country! to have her be adopted by a poor Italian family in Boston
Kinda Weird! Of course, Occam's Razor says that the Buffster is OBVIOUSLY Liz Warren's sister
AT LEAST fourteen*
to be fair, the Buffster SAYS that she was adopted "at the age of two, or three" which would mean..
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR. If Project Scoop didn't start "until the mid-to-late 1950's..
That is KINDA WEIRD
This CBC article leaves no doubt whatsoever that she is a fraud and a very nasty piece of work.
Personally, my grandmother, SAID that we were descended from Pocahontas..
Which of course is KINDA WEIRD, since my grandmother's people were living in germany until about 1860..
But since Pokie's only issue was Thomas Rolfe, i SUPPOSE that HE COULD HAVE gone to Bavaria on a gap year, and fooled around with a beirgarten gal
Maybe, having your family tell you "oral history" is NOT as fool proof as the Ho-Chunk make it seem
Maybe her real father was Iron Eyes Cody?
"For instance, they are frequently approached by Ancestry.com and such places to donate DNA samples so that people can find out whether they have native ancestry"
It's worse than that. American tribes refuse to cooperate with genome scientists and paleo anthropologists for ANY kind of genetic research because WHITE MAN. Per David Reich.
So we're having to make do with what we can get from Canada and latin America.
Can you trust the MA birth certificate of someone who was adopted? Depends on when they were adopted.
I adopted my child, yes the state of MA issued a birth certificate listing my husband and me as parents, my child's place of birth is still listed as their place of birth and it is not in MA. This was done in the 2000s, so like I said it depends, back in the time of the adoption in the article it is very easy to believe that things were fudged and changed.
If she's not genetically related to the indigenous people and she wasn't raised in the environment of the indigenous people, then she is an outsider and doesn't deserve any other special treatment, or benefits, than any other outsider would get.
Will she get a genetic test? I doubt it. She'll just dig her heels in and wait this out.
Aggie said...
"Let the purity-testing commence!"
Sauce for the goose.
Each successive generation is indigenous to a geography, but not necessarily native to a jurisdiction.
“What did you think decolonization looked like?”
Pretendian woman
Stay away from me
Pretendian woman
Mama, let me be
Don't come hangin' round my door
I don't wanna see your braids no more
I got more important things to do
Than spend my time gettin' lectured by you...
-- The Guess What - Live At Meadhouse - 2023
If the Tribe says you're in the Tribe then you're in the Tribe. It works in reverse too. Several San Manuel family members were ejected from the Tribe (for what I do not know) in San Bernardino right about the time the elders got permission to build a huge Casino and resort (recently renamed Yamava) in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains. Once out there is no way back into the Tribe unless the Tribe readmits you, which they refuse to do. Sucks for those guys.
When I was in high school - um, around 1970 - I knew this guy who was a flaming Leftist even then. He went on to be a flaming Leftist in a career in local politics.
We were friendly and would talk about stuff, and he would rave about Buffy Ste. Marie being so great. I listened but shrugged and moved on. A few years later I saw one of her albums in a cutout bin, and decided I'd invest $2 in my friend's judgment.
It was $2 wasted. She looked kinda hot on the album cover, but the music itself was nearly unlistenable. I didn't know she was still around.
According to science, we’re all native to Africa. And in our house, we believe in science.
It turns out she's Rachel Dolezal's mother.
“What did you think decolonization looked like?”
I'm still not clear on the endgame. Once the evil white people are all gone, will the latest indigenous occupants of any particular plot of land return it to the previous indigenous group they stole it from, or what?
My typewriter group was examining some document related to this case the other day, trying to determine if it really was a typed document, period-correct, etc. Not a formal examination, just someone associated with it who asked for input.
The consensus was that it was a genuine typewritten -- albeit a carbon copy -- document. Some disagreement about whether it was futzed with or used two different typewriters, but I'm certain it was a single one.
Buffy the Diversity layer.
Can't she get a testimonial from Senator Fauxcahontas?
I've always thought she was a fraud.
Was she adopted by the tribe or by one family in the tribe? There's a big difference.
@RJ - you made me laugh.
The genetic tests I took say I have a smidgen of Jewish genes and half a smidgen of Neanderthal.
But I can't figure out how to exploit it.
The question is: Why are we giving native Americans special privilages? The time of discrimination has long past.
All Democrat "activists" and pols have to lie, falsify to sell their snake oil.
If a native tribe claims her, paleface documentation and white-man DNA magic are irrelevant (as anyone with the slightest knowledge of native culture knows).
I'm related by marriage to a Lakota named Brokenleg. Is that a plus for me?
But he's also a priest of a white folks religion. So maybe it nets out to zero.
(When my kids were applying to colleges and scholarships, we had countless suggestions that "Drinkwater" could pass for a Native American family name. Lol. If it were Bevilacqua or Boileau instead, no one would have done that.)
Janie said:
“but it's the reason for refusing that I think is so nuts. It's because to donate DNA samples would be just another example of the colonizers' stealing from them.”
The reason for refusing probably has more to do with shares of Casino proceeds.
No need to add or inadvertently subtract stakeholders.
If she was an orphaned native American in Saskatchewan, she would have been killed and buried in an unmarked grave.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/world/canada/mass-graves-residential-schools.html
I, for one, believe in self-appointment to the elite. And if this folk singer wants to be a Piapot and the Piapot happen to agree, then she is a Piapot and adoption versus birth doesn't matter.
I, myself, am the Queen of Romania, hampered in my rule of that great country only by the refusal of anyone else to recognize my claim to royalty. Still, I reign in absentia and hope one day to be appreciated for all I've sacrificed, all I've done for my subjects.
See the difference? She is a Piapot because they say she is, even if she started saying she was before they did. Me, I won't hold my breath waiting for a call to sit on the throne.
Hawkeyesjb said, "'Sainte-Marie was adopted by the Piapot First Nation...' Seems to me that's all that should be required. You're a member of the tribe if the tribe says so."
There's a world of difference between being adopted and being genetically a member. She herself never claimed she was Caucasian because she had white adopted parents. She was either born an Indian or she was a white kid. It appears she was a white kid. The problem with her is she claimed otherwise. That's telling lies, pure and simple.
What do you think colonization looked like? The attack on Deerfield Massachusetts in 1704 was inspired in part by a desire on the part of certain tribes to build up their membership by adoption of captives. This was so common a custom that tribal DNA from any tribe will show a lot of European DNA.
What did you think decolonization looked like? The Red River Rebellion (1869) tried to found a nation protecting the rights of the Metis or mixed bloods in Manitoba. This included the right to be taught the Catholic religion.
The Crack Emcee said...
Joe Smith said...
"If the tribe says she's one of them, who am I to argue?"
That's where I am, too. Plus, why bring this up now? I haven't heard her name in decades.
*********
So....if the Antifa says Rachel Dolezal is black, she's black?
Or is this a case of "racial appropriation"?
Next they will be telling us she didn't actually slay any vampires.
“But seriously, if the tribe says she's one of them, who am I to argue”
Fine with me. Several(/many?) of our Indian tribes made a practice of adopting captives into their tribe. This applied to those from other tribes, as well as Whites and Blacks. May be why so many tribes only go with acknowledgement as a criteria, or proof of ancestry a generation or two away. Moreover, there really probably isn’t much genetic tribal identification possible, as a result, and the Indians we have here, in the US, are very likely from different migrations from Asia, with, for example, the Navajo, from the last migration, probably still closer genetically to their Mongolian ancestors, than to, say, my partner’s kids’ Cherokee grandmother.
“But I can't figure out how to exploit it.“
We accept [Narr], we accept [Narr]. One of us, one of us. Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble.
This sounds to me like it started when, as a teenage folky who didn’t fit into the white bread suburban world on the late ‘50’s, she invented a new, exotic identity for herself to impress her classmates. She wouldn’t be the first teenager who didn’t fit in to do this. So she started dressing and acting the part. (I doubt anyone believed her then.) When, in the ‘60’s she set out to break into the folk music world she found having an exotic identity helped set her apart from the hoards of girl-with-guitar folk acts flooding the coffeehouse and folk festival scene. This wasn’t unusual in the folk music world. Bobby Zimmerman, a middle class boy from Minnesota adopted a poet’s name and a Woody Guthrie dust bowl persona. Ramblin’ Jack Elliot was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who adopted a cowboy drawl. There were others. And then, of course, it took on a life of its own.
If she identifies as indigenous, who are we to argue- those are the rules, right? Right?
“Next they will be telling us she didn't actually slay any vampires.“
Or that her parents weren’t really killed in a car crash in Indiana, orphaning their three children who were then adopted by Brian Keith and reared by a corpulent English man called Mr. French.
Wasn’t Bill Clinton the first Black President?
He was claimed by an ethnic group too.
It is her truth
I understand there was an 85% increase in the US Indigenous population between the 2010 and the 2020 census. Either some US equivalent of the Piapot tribe has been marketing adoptions (no state taxes! a share of the Casino vig!) or there's some perceived advantage to fleeing white ID causing previously white folks to discover their grandma's high cheekbones..
The NYT article leaves out the evidence in the original CBC article that conclusively refutes her story that she was adopted. I believe this was done deliberately to make it easy for NYT readers to continue to believe Sainte-Maries is really indigenous.
1. True that original birth certificates are altered in the case of adoptions. This is not one of those cases.
2. The birth certificate listing her white parents in Massachussetts is the one issued within days of her birth, it's not one issued later after adoption, unless someone had a time machine. From the CBC article:
...if Sainte-Marie was truly born in Saskatchewan on Feb. 20 as her 2018 biography indicates, and weeks or months later adopted into Massachusetts, it would be difficult to explain how birth certificate No. 49 sits neatly between baby 48 born on Feb. 18 and baby 50, born Feb. 24.
3. Saskatchewan has always recorded all adoptions. There is no adoption record for her or any baby that could be her, given when the Massachussetts birth certificate was issued.
4. There is no immigration record for her coming into the United States as a baby to be adopted.
5. The story of what tribe Sainte-Marie was and why she was adopted and why there's no records have changed repeatedly over the years and contradicted by facts. For example, she said the hospital in Canada lost six years' of records covering her birth, but those records are were never in a hospital, and are not missing from their actual location. The Big Scoop started when she was ten years old. She's been Miqmaq, Cree, and Algonquian. Etc.
I also read that her son, Dakota "Cody" Starblanket Wolfchild, took a DNA test and learned he was genetically related to the Santamarias.
The first rule of Diversity Club, is that the Social Industrial Complex (SIC) passes judgments and approves labels superseding personal ambition, legal jurisdiction, and natural state.
My recollection is that we knew this about her 50 years ago, but nobody cared.
Iron Eyes Cody, after all, might've shown up as a regular on The Sopranos if he'd hung on (he died six days before its debut).
Neko Case covers a song by Buffy St. Marie called “Soulful Shade of Blue.” It’s a pretty good song. It’s almost needless to say that the cover is 1 million times better than the original. Neko case is great when she does covers, because she has such a great voice. Her originals, not so much.
she invented a new, exotic identity for herself to impress her classmates. She wouldn’t be the first teenager who didn’t fit in to do this.
After one of my family's many Air Force moves, when I was starting eighth grade, I started telling my new classmates I was from another planet. It was like Fat Amy in Pitch Perfect or Tyrion in GoT, own my weirdness so it couldn't be used against me.
But by the end of the year, I swear some of them believed me.
So Buffy gets a new Althouse tag? That's something. Wikipedia says she inspired
Joni Mitchell. Better than nothing.
I await a comment from Tonto.
James,
My childish fantasies included imagining I was an alien, equipped with a laser weapon in my finger.
On the one hand, lame.
On the other hand, perhaps I missed out on a fine, federally-supported business opportunity there...
2. Do genetics matter when the question is membership in a political group that maintains its own standards and procedures?
They can have whatever procedures they like, but from a third party perspective, this feels like one of those soap operas where an innocent family has been taken in by a conman pretending to be their long lost relative and just can't admit they were gullible. She likely approached them under false pretenses, and they embraced her, believing those lies.
Both sides of my family came here from Norway, migrated across to Nebraska and upper Missouri and yet, here I am, an Oskalooskan. One of them called me "brother" once.
Tonto was no phony.
Adoption Final,Judgements in Georgia always include issuing a new Birth Certificate. Protecting the child from knowing who her parents were was back then considered a good thing. The kid who grows up never sees it that way. They show up at the lawyers office sometimes desperate to find their real mother. And it’s as sincere as it gets.
Ummmmm..........I'm thinking that this is not different that a Britney Spears melt-down.
What's changed? She looks the same, sounds the same.
Maybe race is bullshit.
"...was questioned..."
Why the passive? Questioned by whom? By journalists, who mask their active role in these things and push stories about race.
Can we trust birth certificates?
Not always. My mother's birth certificate has many inaccuracies that mask family secrets.
Well, the grift worked long enough for her to make a living until she was 82. Why should she care that many people now think she’s a fraud at this very late date?
Josephine de Whytell. Why tell? What a name for a lawyer! She is quoted in the CBC story:
“At no point has Buffy Sainte-Marie personally misrepresented her ancestry or any details about her personal history to the public.”
That reads to me as an admission that there were misrepresentations. The lawyerly weasel words are “personally” and “to the public”. See how that statement is still true if Buffy’s publicists made misrepresentations to the public or if Buffy made misrepresentation in private to members of the press who then ran with the story.
A lot of the folk singers of the early 1960s were posers and cultural appropriators, even the great Bob Dylan dabbled in that. Buffy seems to have been able to carry it on until now by being not quite famous enough. Her Uncle Arthur called her out for being a fraud in a 1964 local Wakefield, Massachusetts newspaper story.
Buffy’s father Albert and his brother Arthur, the aforementioned uncle, changed the spelling of their last name from Santamaria (Italian) to St. Marie (French). As can be seen in Albert’s 1998 obituary, other siblings of theirs kept Santamaria. The two brothers appear to have been trying to pass as a French-Canadian family instead of Italian. Her family has a history of identity fluidity.
One aspect of her story is neither provable nor falsifiable: Buffy says her mother Winnifred told her she was adopted. Who can say what was told to Buffy as a young girl.
And this folks is why it pays to be liberal. Had Buffy had a political change of heart and been a Trump supporter - o my. When Joni Mitchell left Spotify over vaccinations and Joe Rogan, I wondered if it was to insure she wouldn’t be called out for her blackface on the cover of Hejira as well as the cultural appropriation both on the Hejira album and the Hissing of Summer Lawns album.
Genetics may be useful to forecast congenital progressive conditions and treatments.
Personally, I try to be colorblind. I try to treat people as individuals, not as parts of groups. I am much more interested in the content of a person's character rather than the color of a person's skin.
Heh.
If she’s a faker, out her. That’s only fair. I despise fakers.
I only very vaguely recall the singer Buffy Sainte-Marie. And that's only because she shared her name with Jody's sister on Family Affair.
I could not tell you what she sang.
Speaking of Buffy, let's remember an Althouse post from the past:
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2018/11/lets-be-thankful-for-shaming.html
I think the message is that folks should not eat too much in the coming weeks re the holidays.
Also re this old post, Althouse didn't comprehend an actress and a professional photographer making pics re the so-called sexy look.
Althouse is hilarious. She's the best!
IMHO.
It was Hissing Of Summer Lawns with Joni In blackface
Eva Marie said...
It was Hissing Of Summer Lawns with Joni In blackface
Incorrect... "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter"
Over the years, lots of people have claimed Native American heritage. There seems to be something romantic about it, I guess. Still, when you look at Elizabeth Warren, you don't see someone who looks Native American. Same with Wayne Newton, who has also claimed some Native American heritage.
If you look at Buffy Sainte Marie, you don't doubt for a minute that she's Native American. It's possible that she has a European background, but it would have to be Eurasian or Romani or some group other than, say, English, German, or Swedish.
What advantage would there have been for her to claim a Native American background in 1963? Did it make her more exotic?
Will Cate said: Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter: You’re right. So there were 3 problematic albums (by today’s standards)
This morning I went back and looked at her album covers online. She looks as much Southern Italian to me as anything else, but whatever.
"Did it make her more exotic?"
Bingo. Does the name Yma Sumac ring a bell?
Yma Sumas WAS exotic, although Capitol Records tried to westernize her. Or North Americanize her, at any rate. Buffy Sainte Marie was an exotic looking singer, but she just did folk music.
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