Michaela Zee A new Canadian Broadcast Corporation investigation has raised questions about the Indigenous identity of Buffy Sainte-Marie.
The singer-songwriter, considered to be the first Indigenous Oscar winner for co-writing the song “Up Where We Belong” from 1982’s “An Officer and a Gentleman,” has long claimed she was born on a Piapot Cree reservation in 1941 in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan.
Sainte-Marie was then adopted by white parents as part of a Canadian government policy known as the Sixties Scoop. The CBC countered these details in a report published Friday, along with an accompanying episode of the documentary series “The Fifth Estate.” In the report, several of Sainte-Marie’s family members “believe her story is an elaborate fabrication,” which is supported by documents obtained by the CBC.
Among these documents is Sainte-Marie’s Stoneham, Mass., birth certificate saying she was born as Beverly Jean Santamaria to parents of European ancestry.
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