Is Buffy Sainte-Marie a First Nations Wannabe?
The Academy Museum may need to Change its Signage
Yesterday, I visited the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, where I regarded a wall of photographs and mini profiles of the groundbreaking women who were the first of their race or ethnicity to win an Oscar.
Here is Hattie McDaniel, the first Black person to win an Academy Award, for “Gone With the Wind,” and here is Miyoshi Umeki, the first Asian woman to win for “Sayonara,” both in the Best Supporting Actress category.
Also included is Buffy Sainte-Marie.
In 1983, her co-written Best Original Song, “Up Where We Belong” from An Officer and a Gentleman, performed as a duet by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes, won Best Original Song.
Her placard in the museum says she is the first Indigenous person to win an Academy Award and that, “She is a Cree musician, author, educator, and actor who was born in Canada and raised in the United States by adoptive parents.”
But it seems Buffy Sainte-Marie is about as Indigenous as Frank Sinatra.
An October, 2023 Canadian broadcast, the CBC’s The Fifth Estate, makes an almost airtight case that she has been fraudulently posing as a Native American over the course of her 60-year career…
