1. Buffy Sainte-Marie was born on Beverley Jean Santamaria; February 20,1941 and is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and social activist.
49 Facts About Buffy Sainte-Marie
1. 2.
Buffy Sainte-Marie has won recognition, awards, and honors for her music as well as her work in education and social activism.
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Since the early 1960s, Buffy Sainte-Marie claimed Indigenous Canadian ancestry, but a 2023 investigation by CBC News concluded she was born in the United States and is of Italian and English descent.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie was born at the New England Sanitarium and Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts, to parents Albert Santamaria and Winifred Irene Santamaria,.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie's father's parents were born in Italy while her mother was of English ancestry.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie's family changed their surname from Santamaria to the more French-sounding "Sainte-Marie" due to anti-Italian sentiment following the Second World War.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie taught herself to play piano and guitar in her childhood and teen years.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie spent a considerable amount of time in the coffeehouses of downtown Toronto's old Yorkville district, and New York City's Greenwich Village as part of the early to mid-1960s folk scene, often alongside other emerging artists such as Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell, the latter of whom she introduced to Elliot Roberts, who became her manager.
9.
In 1963, recovering from a throat infection, Buffy Sainte-Marie became addicted to codeine and recovering from the experience became the basis of her song "Cod'ine", later recorded by Donovan, Janis Joplin, the Charlatans, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Man, the Litter, the Leaves, Jimmy Gilmer, the Fireballs, Gram Parsons, Charles Brutus McClay, the Barracudas, the Golden Horde, Nicole Atkins and Courtney Love.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie appeared on Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest with Pete Seeger in 1965 and several Canadian television productions from the 1960s to the 1990s, and other TV shows such as American Bandstand, Soul Train, The Johnny Cash Show, and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie sang the opening song, "The Circle Game", in Stuart Hagmann's film The Strawberry Statement ; and in the TV show Then Came Bronson episode "Mating Dance for Tender Grass", she sang and portrayed Tender Grass, the episode's titular character.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie appeared in "The Heritage" episode of The Virginian which first aired on October 30,1968, in which she played a Shoshone woman who had been sent to be educated at school.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie was hired in 1975 to present Native American programming for children for the first time on Sesame Street.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie wanted to teach the show's young viewers that "Indians still exist".
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Buffy Sainte-Marie regularly appeared on Sesame Street over a five-year period from 1976 to 1981.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie breastfed her first son, Dakota "Cody" Starblanket Wolfchild, during a 1977 episode.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie has suggested that this is the first representation of breastfeeding ever aired on television.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie began using Apple II and Macintosh computers as early as 1981 to record her music and later some of her visual art.
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On January 29,1983, Jennings, Nitzsche, and Buffy Sainte-Marie won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie was cast for the TNT 1993 telefilm The Broken Chain.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie voiced a Cheyenne character, Kate Bighead, in the 1991 made-for-TV movie Son of the Morning Star, telling the Indian side of the Battle of the Little Bighorn where the Sioux chief, Sitting Bull, defeated Lieutenant Colonel George Custer.
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In 1992, after a sixteen-year recording hiatus, Buffy Sainte-Marie released the album Coincidence and Likely Stories.
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Also in 1992, Buffy Sainte-Marie appeared in the television film The Broken Chain with Wes Studi and Pierce Brosnan along with First Nations Baha'i Phil Lucas.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie has exhibited her art at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Emily Carr Gallery in Vancouver and the American Indian Arts Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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In 2000, Buffy Sainte-Marie gave the commencement address at Haskell Indian Nations University.
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In 2002, a track written and performed by Buffy Sainte-Marie, titled "Lazarus", was sampled by Hip Hop producer Kanye West and performed by Cam'Ron and Jim Jones of The Diplomats.
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In September 2008, Buffy Sainte-Marie made a comeback onto the music scene in Canada with the release of her studio album Running for the Drum.
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In 2015, Buffy Sainte-Marie released the album Power in the Blood on True North Records.
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Also in 2015, A Tribe Called Red released an electronic remix of Buffy Sainte-Marie's song, "Working for the Government".
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In 2016, Buffy Sainte-Marie toured North America with Mark Olexson, Anthony King, Michel Bruyere, and Kibwe Thomas.
31.
Saint-Marie is the subject of Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On, a 2022 documentary film by Madison Thomas.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie appears in the 1985 video Mona With The Children by Douglas John Cameron.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie applied for Canadian citizenship through her Cree lawyer, Delia Opekokew, in 1980.
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In 1968, Buffy Sainte-Marie married a surfing instructor, Dewain Bugbee, but later divorced.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie then married Sheldon Wolfchild with whom she had a son.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie has claimed that she was born on the Piapot 75 reserve in the Qu'Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, Canada, to Cree parents.
37.
The first reference to Buffy Sainte-Marie being Cree that CBC News could locate during its investigation of her identity came in December 1963, when the Vancouver Sun called her a "Cree Indian".
38.
Buffy Sainte-Marie reiterated that she has community ties with the Piapot First Nation and that she was adopted as an adult by Chief Emile Piapot and Clara Starblanket.
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Emile's great-granddaughter Ntawnis Piapot has corroborated this, saying Buffy Sainte-Marie was adopted according to traditional Cree customs over "days and months and years".
40.
Some members of the Buffy Sainte-Marie family had attempted to clarify her European ancestry in the 1960s and 1970s, but the singer threatened them with legal action for doing so.
41.
Buffy Sainte-Marie's brother, Alan Sainte-Marie, wrote to newspapers, including the Denver Post in 1972, to clarify that his sister was not born on a reservation, has Caucasian parents, and that "to associate her with the Indian and to accept her as his spokesman is wrong".
42.
Buffy Sainte-Marie has said that the producer later asked her father if he was Indigenous because he did not look like he was.
43.
Buffy Sainte-Marie's father clarified that they were of European ancestry and not Indigenous.
44.
Buffy Sainte-Marie decided to back off from his letter-writing campaign and a month later on December 9,1975, Buffy made her first appearance on Sesame Street.
45.
In contrast, Buffy Sainte-Marie's 2018 authorized biography states she was "probably born" on the Piapot First Nation reserve in Saskatchewan, and throughout her adult life she claimed she was adopted and does not know where she was born or who her biological parents are.
46.
Since then, there have been calls to rescind awards given to Buffy Sainte-Marie that were meant for Indigenous people.
47.
Indigenous musicians who lost to Buffy Sainte-Marie have expressed their disappointment.
48.
On November 8,2023, the University of British Columbia First Nations House of Learning issued a statement explaining that, in light of the ancestry issues of Buffy Sainte-Marie, they were deciding on the next steps regarding the honorary degree UBC had awarded Sainte-Marie in 2012.
49.
On February 7,2025, the Government of Canada published a document stating that Buffy Sainte-Marie had been removed from the Order of Canada by Governor General Mary Simon on January 3,2025.