Buffy Sainte-Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie, (born Beverly Jean Santamaria; February 20, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, musician and social activist. While working in these areas, her work has focused on issues facing Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Since the early1960s, Sainte-Marie has claimed to have Indigenous Canadian ancestry, but a 2023 investigation by CBC News concluded she was born in the United States and is of European descent. Her singing and writing repertoire also includes subjects of love, war, religion, and mysticism. She has won recognition, awards and honours for her music as well as her work in education and social activism. In 1983, her song "Up Where We Belong", co-written for the film An Officer and a Gentleman, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 55th Academy Awards. The song also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song that same year. In 1997, she founded the Cradleboard Teaching Project, an educational curriculum devoted to better understanding Native Americans. Personal life According to her website biography, Sainte-Marie was born in 1941 on the Piapot 75 reserve in the Qu'Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, Canada, to Cree parents, and at the age of two or three she was taken from her parents as part of the Sixties Scoop—a government policy where indigenous children were taken from their families, communities and cultures for placement in non-First Nations families. However, a 2023 investigation by CBC News found that Sainte-Marie was born at the New England Sanitarium and Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts, to biological parents Albert Santamaria and Winifred Irene Santamaria, . The Santamarias, who she has claimed she was adopted by, were an American couple from Wakefield, Massachusetts. Her father Albert's parents were born in Italy while her mother Winifred was of English ancestry. Her mother was of old New England stock, a descendant of Mayflower passenger Elder William Brewster. Her family changed their surname from Santamaria to Sainte-Marie due to "anti-Italian sentiment" following the Second World War. Though "visibly white", her mother, Winifred, "self-identified as part Mi'kmaq," according to Sainte-Marie. She attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst earning degrees in teaching and Oriental philosophy; she graduated as one of the top ten members of her class.