This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks for stories about something that we always thought was true, that's turned out not to be true.
I'm glad to have this opportunity to put in a word in support of someone I've always liked.
Record cover photo from Google.
I always thought Buffy Sainte-Marie had some sort of indigenous Canadian ancestry. Even though the blurb on the first LP of hers that I ever had said that she'd been adopted by indigenous people, thought she was "really" Cree but was trying to find out for sure who her physical ancestors had been...I thought it would be a question of which Cree family, or whether she had other kinds of ancestors too.
She looked so "Indian." She sounded so "Indian." She was so passionate about being an "Indian." She gave back to her adoptive parents and their tribe. Younger people on the reservations admired her, and she gave them an absolutely "Indian" response.
"I've got my own kith,
I've got my own kin,
I've got my own sin,
And it's my way.
I've got my own prayers,
I've got my own fears,
I've got my own tears,
And it's my way.
Put down the story of what I've known;
You're bound for glory all on your own."
And she told it like it was to all of us biracial Americans and Canadians who grew up enjoying all the benefits of being White while still feeling some pride in our ancient lineage.
"Your great-great-grandfather from 'Indian' blood sprang,
And you feel in your heart for these ones?...
It's still going on here today:
The government now wants the Navajo land,
That of the Seneca and the Cheyenne.
It's here and it's now you must help us, dear man,
Now that the buffalo's gone."
In that inimitable voice of hers--so pretty and tuneful one minute, so raspy and alien the next. She was a total drama queen. She looked young and beautiful for a very long time, and she used her face to good effect. "She looked mean," a White relative quavered. I could imagine. On the record that last "Now that the buffalo's gone" did sound as if it might have been leading up to "So, Paleface, fight if you dare!" I was not intimidated. I was not inclined to disagree with her. Treaties were still being broken and ought still to be enforced. I did not yet know that we had Cherokee ancestors, thought my brother and his friends who wanted to reclaim their Cherokee identity were being childish, but I did know that the Cherokee Nation has been cheated enough and other indigenous groups have been treated even worse. I would not have wanted to say so in a way that would alarm that dear old White relative, but I was with Buffy. I was with women, generally, who have learned that looking pretty and sweet sometimes gets the wrong kind of attention. Pretty and sweet makes men's eyes glaze over as they start to drool and squirm. Angry and grim wakes them up...n'est-ce pas, Paleface? Only Buffy Sainte-Marie could look angry and grim and beautiful, all at the same time.
It did not look possible that Buffy Sainte-Marie could have been of pure European descent, but it turns out that she was. She was adopted by Cree people but her real parents were not Cree. Nor were they Canadian. Nor were they even French; their name was Santamaria, but they'd changed it to Sainte-Marie during the War, when Italians were enemies. That American couple who had also adopted or fostered her for a while? They were her biological parents, all along.
Exactly how confused were Baby Buffy's early years? Did she intentionally disown her Italian-American father and English-American mother? Because they were abusive? Because being the "Native North American Child" was a great stage gimmick to launch a career? Did her parents intentionally disown her, before she was rich and famous? Because back then other women didn't want to live in the same dormitory or apartment block with a single mother? Because even in my youth Nice Girl credibility was often felt to require acting as if having a baby before the wedding were an incurable contagious disease? Because a lot of premarital babies, and even children of divorce, used to be intentionally confused about who their real parents were? None of that is any of her fans' business.
What is public business, sort of: Though only an adoptive Cree, Sainte-Marie was a professional Cree, receiving opportunities and awards and funds on the basis of her being Cree rather than on the basis of her being a great singer. At some point she had to have known she was receiving some of those benefits in competition with people who, though less talented, were in fact Cree.
The position of this web site is that people who are more about ancestry than about talent or achievement, when it comes to funding that's supposed to be about achievement, deserve to be shown up in every possible way; but it is too bad if someone who actually needed ancestry-based benefits, who couldn't sell a record on music alone, didn't get ancestry-based funding that Sainte-Marie did.
Meanwhile, to what extent does choice matter?
In a bit of speculative fiction I once invented a character who looked more Italian than anything else, was adopted by Italian-Americans, liked "being" Italian-American, but then turned out to be from a different planet...(The character popped into my head when I looked at a cute but not really human-looking doll in a store.) Do choices have any bearing on identity?
Sainte-Marie poured money and energy into indigenous causes. Does that mean anything any more?
Sainte-Marie now has a web site that states that she "virtually created the role" of Native American activist. Does it make a difference that she "created the role" to give something back to her adoptive family, rather than to support the rock-star lifestyle she could reasonably claim to have earned? (Does it matter that she probably wouldn't have survived a rock-star lifestyle for as long as she has, by now, been alive?)
Anyway: I thought she probably was Cree, and if she had European ancestors they probably would have been French. So I was deceived by looks like everyone else.
Turns out that, if we go by DNA alone, Sainte-Marie's name might as well have been...oh, say, Sinatra. Or Bertinelli. Or Pacino, Loren, De Niro, Minelli, Scorsese, Milano, DeLuise. Ciardi, Lombardi, Puzo, Garagiola, Mantovani, Liberace. It's not as if Italian descent kept people from succeeding in the entertainment business during Sainte-Marie's lifetime.
I say choice matters. If her adoptive parents say she's Cree by adoption, and she demonstrates that she's Cree by choice, then she's close enough to being Cree that we can leave her in peace.
Also, she rocked in 1964. Also, she still does.
Recently I saw another one of those cartoons that mock Senator Warren by portraying her as a traditional healer, and it reminded me that Warren's presumption that her cheekbones were Cherokee had nothing to do with the shift in the popular imagination--from indigenous Americans as sneaking, tomahawk-waving "savages" to indigenous Americans as healers and Green activisits. Warren came along after that shift had started to happen, and claimed to be Cherokee when and only when she was able to take advantage of that shift in stereotyping. Buffy Sainte-Marie did a lot to create that beneficial change. To give even our ancestors' names for themselves or for one another the sound of anything any girl in her right mind ever wanted to identify with. When I was a four-year-old learning to read, "Cherokee" did not look or sound like a friendly name. Now it does. The shift started with Will Rogers and was greatly boosted by Vine Deloria, and also by Buffy Sainte-Marie.
Elizabeth Warren is in no way Cherokee but Buffy Sainte-Marie is Cree by adoption. Even if she has, and this is probably a unique achievement no set of DNA has ever accomplished before or will accomplish again, managed to look more "Indian" than some people who were born on reservations- while being Italian.
Also, she and/or her friends are in the process of building a beautiful web site (A lot of older celebrities, like Wendell Berry, have web sites or social media accounts and, if asked about the content on them, say "I didn't do that!") Each time I visit I find more of her songs, good strong songs that will last long after her time, at
