Buffy Sainte-Marie Loses Order of Canada After Indigenous Ancestry Investigation
Canadian American singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie has been stripped of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honor.
“Notice is hereby given that the appointment of Buffy Sainte-Marie to the Order of Canada was terminated by Ordinance signed by the Governor General on January 3, 2025,” a Feb. 8 notice in the Canada Gazette, the federal government’s official publication, stated.
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No reason was given for the termination, but the notice was signed by Ken MacKillop, secretary general of the Order of Canada. The move, however, follows a 2023 investigation by the CBC’s The Fifth Estate series that alleged Sainte-Marie had been fraudulently posing as Native over the course of her 60-year career.
The documentary episode claimed the singer-songwriter’s white adoptive parents were in fact her biological parents. Sainte-Marie, considered the first Indigenous winner of an Academy Award, pushed back against questions over her ancestry raised in the CBC program.
In a lengthy statement following the airing of the CBC investigation, Sainte-Marie said the network relied on a story fabricated by her childhood abuser and brother, Alan, and two members of her estranged family that she doesn’t know. The singer-songwriter added The Fifth Estate program relied on a birth certificate of hers that she had never seen before.
Sainte-Marie in 1982 earned a best original song Oscar for co-writing “Up Where We Belong” as part of the score for the movie An Officer and a Gentleman. She shared the Oscar trophy with lyricist Will Jennings and co-writer Jack Nitzsche.
Sainte-Marie also argued answering questions about her background had been complicated by being unable to find her birth parents and other information about her upbringing. The Fifth Estate program claimed it found news clippings referring to Sainte-Marie as alternately Algonquin, Mi’kmaq and Cree.
And her authorized biography stated she was born in 1941 on Cree land in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan and removed from her birth family and adopted by a white American family, the Sainte-Maries, as part of a notorious government policy known as the Sixties Scoop.
But the CBC show claimed it had found Sainte-Marie’s purported birth certificate, which stated that she was born in 1941 in Stoneham, Massachusetts, to Albert and Winifred Santamaria, her supposed adoptive parents, who are listed as white.
The Hollywood Reporter reached out to representatives for Sainte-Marie for direct comment over the Order of Canada termination, but has yet to hear back.
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