Canadian-American singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie has been stripped of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
“Discover is hereby provided that the appointment of Buffy Sainte-Marie to the Order of Canada was terminated by Ordinance signed by the Governor Normal on January 3, 2025,” a Feb. 8 discover within the Canada Gazette, the federal authorities’s official publication, acknowledged.
No cause was given for the termination, however the discover was signed by Ken MacKillop, secretary common of the Order of Canada. The transfer, nonetheless, follows a 2023 investigation by the CBC’s The Fifth Propertycollection that alleged Sainte-Marie had been fraudulently posing as Native over the course of her 60-year profession.
The documentary episode claimed the singer-songwriter’s white adoptive dad and mom have been in reality her organic dad and mom. Sainte-Marie, thought-about the primary Indigenous winner of an Academy Award, pushed again towards questions over her ancestry raised within the CBC program.
In a prolonged assertion following the airing of the CBC investigation, Sainte-Marie mentioned the community relied on a narrative fabricated by her childhood abuser and brother, Alan, and two members of her estranged household that she doesn’t know. The singer-songwriter added The Fifth Property program relied on a beginning certificates of hers that she had by no means seen earlier than.
Sainte-Marie in 1982 earned a greatest authentic tune Oscar for co-writing “Up The place We Belong” as a part of the rating for the film An Officer and a Gentleman. She shared the Oscar trophy with lyricist Will Jennings and co-writer Jack Nitzsche.
Sainte-Marie additionally argued answering questions on her background had been difficult by being unable to seek out her beginning dad and mom and different details about her upbringing. The Fifth Property program claimed it discovered information clippings referring to Sainte-Marie as alternately Algonquin, Mi’kmaq and Cree.
And her licensed biography acknowledged she was born in 1941 on Cree land within the Canadian province of Saskatchewan and faraway from her beginning household and adopted by a white American household, the Sainte-Maries, as a part of a infamous authorities coverage referred to as the Sixties Scoop.
However the CBC present claimed it had discovered Sainte-Marie’s purported beginning certificates, which acknowledged that she was born in 1941 in Stoneham, Massachusetts, to Albert and Winifred Santamaria, her supposed adoptive dad and mom, who’re listed as white.
The Hollywood Reporter reached out to representatives for Sainte-Marie for direct remark over the Order of Canada termination, however has but to listen to again.
