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.