Oh you’re Native?

By Jyl Wheaton-Abraham
Reader Contributor

I was at the laundromat scrolling through social media when I saw a comment that made me laugh out loud. Normally I avoid laughing and speaking to myself, especially at the laundromat, but the humor was so dark I could not control myself. What did it say? “The Niña, the Pinta and the Buffy Santa Maria.” 

For those of you who are unaware, the CBC just released a documentary regarding Buffy Sainte-Marie’s claims to indigenous ancestry. Spoiler alert: She’s probably an American of Italian descent. This revelation has torn through Native social media, with everyone taking a side. 

People are struggling with how to process what was uncovered. Some say she should still be honored for the work she has accomplished, while others can do little more than express hurt and anger for being betrayed by a woman many admired. 

People who pretend to be Native but are not are commonly known as “Pretendians.” Oftentimes, they take on an indigenous identity for prestige or profit, receiving awards, grants and jobs meant for Native people. They rely on stereotypes and a perceived ambiguity about indigenous origins and record keeping to support their claims. 

When pressed for information, their stories often shift to protect their lies and livelihoods. When they are outed as Pretendians, they often express no remorse for the damage they have caused. 

Like many before her, Buffy Sainte-Marie has done all of these. Leading up to the premiere of the documentary, she released a video stating, “My truth as I know it.” In it, she declared she “visited places no one else would want to go to … told stories that no one else would.” 

As a Native woman and scholar, these words insulted me. The places “no one else would want to go” are communities that many people call home. The stories no one else would tell are the histories people have passed down through countless generations. 

Only an outsider would make declarations such as these — an identity Buffy Sanite-Marie claimed numerous times as a Canadian child adopted by an American family, as a victim of the “Sixties Scoop” (despite being born in 1941), and as a Native woman in a Caucasian-dominated world. 

In my last piece, I brought up “remembering,” but it should be understood as “re-membering,” the opposite of dismemberment. Native cultures, communities and individuals were dismembered for the creation of the United States; tribes renamed and displaced; families split up; bodies scrutinized by scientists measuring skulls and nuns cutting braids; our beauty distorted and fetishized for the colonizer gaze. 

Sainte-Marie is leaning on dismemberment to bolster her origin story with claims of not knowing her birth family, her birthplace or even her birthday. She has self-identified as Indigenous Canadian, half-Mi’kmaq and of Cree descent. She wears beadwork and feathers and appears to dye her hair black to embody what non-Natives think Native women should look like. 

Like our region’s own Rachel Dolezal, Buffy Sainte-Marie seems to confuse clothing and hairstyles for culture, exploiting real pain for personal gain. If she truly is an Italian pretending to be a Native woman, she is colonization personified. 

To resist colonization, we must all re-member ourselves, especially in this place. 

Another social media post said something along the lines of, “Buffy is still indigenous… to Europe! She can always go back and reconnect with her roots!” 

What a great point. Too often I hear people refer to themselves as a “Native” of Sandpoint or North Idaho, but calling yourself Native in the United States without indigenous roots erases me and people like me. 

Being Native means more than looking a certain way or being born in a particular place. It comes with responsibilities to the land, to the past and the future, and exposes one to the true dangers of colonization, because the ultimate goal of colonization is to eliminate the indigenous population so the colonizers can become the Natives and no one will refute. 

Rather than continue that legacy in our shared place, I encourage you to find your ancestors, honor their stories and struggles, refrain from the urge to play Pretendian and avoid using the term “Native” when describing settlers living in a colonial state. 

Jyl Wheaton-Abraham is a member of the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho. She has an M.A. in applied anthropology, focusing on archaeology and queer, indigenous decolonizing theory.