The Governor General’s workplace has terminated singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Order of Canada.
The transfer was introduced within the Canada Gazette, the federal authorities’s official newspaper through which it publishes the textual content of recent legal guidelines, rules and different notices and choices.
The transfer comes after a CBC report in 2023 questioned Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous heritage, saying it discovered a start certificates that indicated she was born in 1941 in Massachusetts and listed that each her and her dad and mom as white.
“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 brief message, revealed on the Gazette web site on Feb. 8, learn.
Family members within the U.S., together with a youthful sister, advised CBC that Sainte-Marie doesn’t have Indigenous ancestry, nor was she adopted.
FILE – Buffy Sainte-Marie performs on the Americana Music Honors and Awards present in 2015, in Nashville, Tenn.
AP Photo / Mark Zaleski
Sainte-Marie, 83, pushed again towards the CBC investigation shortly after it made nationwide headlines, saying the outlet’s The Fifth Estate episode was stuffed with omissions and errors.
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“Being an ‘Indian’ has little to do with sperm tracking and colonial record keeping: it has to do with community, culture, knowledge, teachings, who claims you, who you love, who loves you and who’s your family,” Sainte-Marie mentioned in a written assertion to The Canadian Press on the time.
She additionally mentioned she “will not stoop to respond to every false allegation” and that she’d “heard from countless people with similar stories who do not know where they are from and feel victimized by these allegations.”
Sainte-Marie additionally posted video to her social media accounts forward of the CBC’s reporting, saying she has shared her story for 60 years and known as herself a “proud member of the Native community with deep roots in Canada.”
“But there are also many things I don’t know, which I’ve always been honest about. I don’t know where I’m from, who my birth parents are or how I ended up a misfit in a typical white Christian New England home,” she mentioned within the video.
“I realized decades ago that I would never have the answers.”
Sainte-Marie’s official web site as soon as mentioned she was “believed to have been born in 1941 on the Piapot First Nation reserve in Saskatchewan and taken from her biological parents when she was an infant.”
Ntawnis Piapot, the great-granddaughter of Emile Piapot and Clara Starblanket, each deceased, who adopted Sainte-Marie, advised Global News on the time that the declare Sainte-Marie has no Indigenous ancestry has no bearing on her belonging to a Cree household.
Buffy Sainte-Marie is pictured (centre) with Emile Piapot and Clara Starblanket.
Buffy Sainte-Marie / Facebook
“The adoption process, it took years — it took days and months and years of getting to know each other and trusting each other and going to ceremony and getting her Indian name (from my mushum) to finally look at her and be like, I acknowledge you as my daughter, you’re officially part of our family.”
It was executed in Cree customized, Piapot mentioned, and whereas Sainte-Marie didn’t declare proof of blood relations, she is accepted as kin due to that ceremony.
“It’s really insulting that someone would question my great grandfather’s choice and right to adopt Buffy as his daughter,” Piapot advised Global News.
“No one has the authority to question our sovereignty, we are a sovereign nation, we are sovereign people and our adoption practices have been intact since time immemorial.
“Having someone question the validity of that adoption… it’s hurtful, it’s ignorant, it’s colonial, and quite frankly it’s racist.”
Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous tradition was a central a part of her identification as she rose to fame within the Nineteen Sixties, and he or she has gained awards together with a number of Junos and the Polaris Music Prize in 2015.
Among her many accolades, Sainte-Marie gained an Oscar in 1983 for finest authentic track, starred on six seasons of Sesame Street, influencing the present’s storylines, and based the Nihewan Foundation — a corporation devoted to bettering schooling of and about Indigenous folks and cultures.
She retired from performing in 2023, citing well being causes.
Global News has reached out to her publicist for remark, however didn’t instantly hear again.
— With information from Global News’ Melissa Ridgen and The Associated Press
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.