Buffy Sainte-Marie, CC (born Beverly Jean Santamaria; February 20, 1941)[1] is an American singer-songwriter, musician and social activist.[3] While working in these areas, her work has focused on issues facing Indigenous peoples of the United States and Canada. Since the early 1960s, Sainte-Marie has claimed to have Indigenous Canadian ancestry. A 2023 investigation by CBC News concluded she was born in the United States and is of European descent.[2]
Her singing and writing repertoire also includes subjects of love, war, religion, and mysticism. She has won recognition, awards and honours for her music as well as her work in education and social activism. In 1983, her song "Up Where We Belong", co-written for the film An Officer and a Gentleman, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 55th Academy Awards.[4][5] The song also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song that same year.[6] In 1997, she founded the Cradleboard Teaching Project, an educational curriculum devoted to better understanding Native Americans.[7]
Honours and awards Some of her honours and awards are,
Academy Award for Best Original Song "Up Where We Belong" (1983)[5] Inducted into the Canadian Juno Awards Hall of Fame (1994)[77] Officer of the Order of Canada (1997)[78] Honorary Doctor of Letters Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (2007)[79] Honorary Doctor of Laws Carleton University (2008)[80] Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Ontario College of Art and Design (2010)[81] Governor General's Performing Arts Award (2010)[82] Polaris Music Prize Power in the Blood (2015) Juno Award Indigenous music album of the year (2018) (for Medicine Songs)[83] Indigenous Music Awards Best Folk Album (2018) (for Medicine Songs)[84] Honorary Doctor of Laws University of Toronto (2019)[85] Polaris Heritage Prize It's My Way! (2020)[86] New stamp honours renowned singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie November 18, 2021[8
However, a 2023 investigation by CBC News found that Sainte-Marie was born at the New England Sanitarium and Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts, to biological parents Albert Santamaria and Winifred Irene Santamaria, nιe Kendrick.[2] The Santamarias, who she has claimed she was adopted by, were an American couple from Wakefield, Massachusetts. Her father Albert's parents were born in Italy while her mother Winifred was of English ancestry.[2] Her family changed their surname from Santamaria to Sainte-Marie due to anti-Italian sentiment following the Second World War.[2] Though "visibly white", her mother, Winifred, "self-identified as part Mi'kmaq," according to Sainte-Marie. She attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst earning degrees in teaching and Oriental philosophy;[15] she graduated as one of the top ten members of her class.
In 1964, on a trip to the Piapot Cree reserve in Canada for a powwow, she was welcomed and (in a Cree Nation context) adopted by the youngest son of Chief Piapot, Emile Piapot and his wife, Clara Starblanket Piapot, who added to Sainte-Marie's cultural value and place in native culture
Video:
Investigating Buffy Sainte-Maries claims to Indigenous ancestry - The Fifth Estate
2017 Described by Sainte-Marie as "a collection of front-line songs of unity and resistance,"
Posts: 42919 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
posted
This is tragic. If true then one more of ones childhoods icons has fallen. I still remember her strong voice when she sang the title song to the film Soldier Blue.
Seems there are many compromising details in the documentary. Seems also that it is hard to trust any public figures. They must all be checked.
On a bigger note it is sad that there are so many pretendians who want to make money of Native American culture.
Also Sacheen Littlefeather has been accused (after her death) to be a pretendian. Littlefeather got famous when she attended the 45th Academy Awards in 1973 on behalf of actor Marlon Brando who refused to accept his prize.
quote:Littlefeather represented Marlon Brando at the 45th Academy Awards (better known as the Oscars) in 1973, where she on Brando's behalf declined the Best Actor award that he won for his performance in The Godfather. The favorite to win, Brando boycotted the ceremony as a protest against Hollywood's portrayal of Native Americans and to draw attention to the standoff at Wounded Knee. During her speech, the audience's response to Brando's boycotting was divided between booing and applause.
The film was the third-most popular film at the British box office in 1971.[8] It brought $1.2 million from the U.S./ Canada rentals.[2] The title song, written and performed by Buffy Sainte-Marie, was released as a single and became a top ten hit in the UK as well as other countries in Europe and Japan during the summer of 1971.
Soldier Blue is a 1970 American Revisionist Western film directed by Ralph Nelson and starring Candice Bergen, Peter Strauss, and Donald Pleasence. Adapted by John Gay from the novel Arrow in the Sun by T.V. Olsen, it is inspired by events of the 1864 Sand Creek massacre in the Colorado Territory. Nelson and Gay intended to utilize the narrative surrounding the Sand Creek massacre as an allegory for the contemporary Vietnam War.[4]
Released in August 1970, the film drew attention for its frank depictions of violence, specifically its graphic final sequence. Some film scholars have cited Soldier Blue as a critique of America's "archetypal art form [the Western]," with other interpretations ranging from it being an anti-war picture to an exploitation film.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote of the film: "Soldier Blue is indeed savage, but it wears its cloak of "truth" self-consciously. It is supposed to be a pro-Indian movie, and at the end the camera tells us the story was true, more or less, and that the Army chief of staff himself called the massacre shown in the film one of the most shameful moments in American history."[11] He added: "So it was, and of course we're supposed to make the connection with My Lai and take Soldier Blue as an allegory for Vietnam. But that just won't do. The film is too mixed up to qualify as a serious allegory about anything."[11] The Time Out film guide called the film "a grimly embarrassing anti-racist Western about the U.S. Cavalry's notorious Sand Creek Indian massacre in 1864. In the interests of propaganda, one might just about stomach the way the massacre itself is turned into a gleefully exploitative gore-fest of blood and amputated limbs; but not when it's associated with a desert romance that's shot like an ad-man's wet dream, all soft focus and sweet nothings."[12]
Contemporary Modern critics and scholars have alternately described Soldier Blue as a revisionist western[13] "anti-American,"[14] and as an exploitation film.[5] In 2004, the BBC named it "one of the most significant American films ever made."[15] British author and critic P.B. Hurst, who wrote the 2008 book The Most Savage Film: Soldier Blue, Cinematic Violence and the Horrors of War, said of the film:
A good number of critics in 1970 believed that Soldier Blue had set a new mark in cinematic violence, as a result of its graphic scenes of Cheyenne women and children being slaughtered, and had thus lived up or down to its U.S. poster boast that it was "The Most Savage Film in History." A massive hit in Great Britain and much of the rest of the world, Soldier Blue was, in the words of its maverick director, Ralph Nelson, "not a popular success" in the United States. This probably had less to do with the picture's groundbreaking violence, and more to do with the fact that it was the U.S. Cavalry who were breaking new ground. For Nelson's portrayal of the boys in blue as blood crazed maniacs, who blow children's brains out and women, shattered for ever one of America's most enduring movie myths that of the cavalry as good guys riding to the rescue and rendered Soldier Blue one of the most radical films in the history of American cinema. The film's failure in its homeland might also have had something to do with the perception in some quarters prompted by production company publicity material that it was a deliberate Vietnam allegory.
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
Printer-friendly view of this topic