Vampire the Buffy Slayer

 

An officially “indigenous” commentator is excoriating the CBC for breaking the news that Buffy Sainte-Marie is not indigenous. This, he or she (they claim to be “two-spirit”) argues, violates the obligation of all non-Indians towards reconciliation, because it traumatizes aboriginal people. 

It is not entirely clear what the CBC should have done instead; the author seems to say that aboriginals should have been given more time to digest the news. 

How do you report the news more slowly? Note the meaning of the word “news.” 

Leaving aside the implied assumption that Indians are helpless forest creatures unable to look after themselves or deal with the real world, necessarily, what both spirits really meant is that the CBC should have kept it secret. In other words, suppress rather than report the news.

This seems an unreasonable deman.

I think the real reason some indigenous people are upset is that the Buffy Sainte-Marie story, following so closely after the revelation that there were no mass graves at residential schools, is getting dangerously close to exposing the whole “First Nations” and “reconciliation” industry as a fraud.

Most on Buffy Sainte-Marie

 

The actual CBC documentary on Buffy Sainte-Marie has dropped. It’s even worse than reported. It looks as though, to protect her claim of aboriginal ancestry, she falsely accused her brother of abusing her sexually as a child—to shut him up about it.

The initial response of one acquaintance on Facebook—I doubt they had yet seen the documentary—was that The Fifth Estate should not have run the story, should have buried it; it is just mean. After all, the bottom line is that Sainte-Marie is immensely talented. What else matters? And it is not as if she was doing it to real natives: she was advocating for them. This is close to my own initial take: all’s fair in marketing your art.

The common response to that position is that, in accepting numerous awards, grants, media attention and advantages on the premise that she was aboriginal, she was taking away opportunities from real aboriginals. 

But my counter to that is that any system that gives awards, grants, and advantages based on some unalterable characteristic, something over which you had no control, is deeply unjust and racist. Accordingly, Sainte-Marie is a freedom fighter by subverting the system. We should all declare ourselves indigenous, and restore human equality. I feel worse about her flinging accusations of being discriminated against as a Native American, when she was not.

Yet I also feel it is important that The Fifth Estate exposed the lie. Truth is an intrinsic and absolute value, and need not be justified in any way. The devil is the father of lies.

And this went beyond marketing. Donald Trump does marketing: he makes exaggerated claims, but everyone pretty much knows he is exaggerating. P.T. Barnum made exaggerated claims; but everyone really knew there were no Fiji mermaids. These are not really lies, but jokes. 

Sainte-Marie definitively lied about being aboriginal. This being so, we can assume she also lied about being abused by her brother. It follows a similar pattern. Which means she was prepared to blackmail, to slander, to sustain the lie.

Once you begin to lie, you go down a dark path leading you to worse and worse acts. By exposing Sainte-Marie, The Fifth Estate has taught us all an important moral lesson.

More on Buffy Sainte-Marie

 

Real name Beverley Santamaria. She's Italian/English. At different times she has claimed to be Micmac, Algonquin, and Cree.

I'll be darned.

Who Is Buffy Sainte-Marie?

 

This is wilder than I realized. Now CBC says they have found Buffy Sainte-Marie's birth certificate. It indicates she was not adopted. She was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts, to two "white" parents. 

Everything else, apparently, was made up.

Following ...

Playing the Indian Card

 

A lot of famous Indians turn out not to be. Grey Owl; Iron Eyes Cody; Elizabeth Warren; Sacheen Littlefeather, the “Indian” who rejected Brando’s Oscar.

And Buffy Sainte-Marie?

A current CBC investigation points out that she cannot establish Indian ancestry. She was raised in a rather unexotic adoptive middle-class home in Maine. And they did not know who her real parents were. They might have been Sicilian, or Lebanese, or Sephardic Jews, for all anyone knows.

She looks Indian to me; but does it matter what her genetics are? She had the same upbringing, the same cultural influences, as any “white” child growing up in North America in the forties and fifties. She is ethnically simply American.

The broader point: any pretense that North American Indians, “First Nations,” have a distinct and separate culture is a romantic fantasy. “Indians” get what knowledge they have of traditional “Indian” culture the same place the rest of us get it: from movies, TV, comic book and dime novels. If they are more learned, from the accounts of missionaries.

And “Indians” have never been discriminated against. It was essential to Sainte-Marie’ career success to play the Indian card. She sold herself, in her own words, as “Pocahontas”; and the public loved it. Following in the footsteps of the performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, and the Kickapoo Medicine shows; of Grey Owl, Pauline Johnson, and many another performer in buckskin. The general public of North America loves Indians, has always loved Indians, wants to cheer for them—which is why Indian references are popular names for sports teams—and will always give them the benefit of the doubt.

That said, to be clear: Buffy Sainte-Marie deserves every bit of her fame, and more. I don’t deride her marketing tactics, any more than I scorn Elvis Presley for performing in white jumpsuits with sequins. I’m proud she is an Indian like me.