So if you haven’t heard the news by now, The Fifth Estate revealed that Buffy St. Marie has lied about her heritage all these many years since the 1960s. Not only was she not adopted, she’s not even native. It’s a hard watch if you’re a fan like I am, but it’s worth watching to the end. Her family at various points tried to inform the world that she was lying about being native, but it was only now that the truth really came out.
Why does this bother me so much? Why am I being so dramatic talking about this broke my heart? Listen, I have been a fan of this woman since I was a small child. If you’ve known me for five minutes, then you know I love Sesame Street. Well, Buffy St. Marie was often on Sesame Street with her little baby boy, Cody.
And she played a mouth bow, for god’s sake!
On top of that, I admired her music and artistry so much. She’s a great songwriter! Her most famous song is ‘Love Lift Us Up Where We Belong’ which was famously sung by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes.
She often had to produce her music herself, there was this whole backstory about how the recording industy blacklisted her in the 1970s due to being native and politically vocal about oppression against her people and such. I admired her activism and indie work ethic and strived to emulate it with my own creative endeavors. I knew I could be a self-publisher because of Buffy St. Marie and people like her, feel me. I also admired her being an early adopter of technology, for example she was one of the first people to record an album on computer and upload it in the 1980s.
This is just so bizarre and devastating to me, because she was/is really something. There was no need to lie about her heritage, it’s undeniable that she is an extremely talented and extremely creative person and always has been. Why build on a foundation of lies and deceit? And she’s STILL lying! This woman is in her 80s and still unable to be real, to the point where she threw her own mother under the bus! Now she’s claiming that her mother told her she may have been born ‘on the wrong side of the blanket’ that is, her mom cheated on her dad. Unbelievable. I have lost so much respect for Buffy St. Marie.
