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.
In 1964, on a trip to the Piapot Cree reserve in Canada for a powwow, she was welcomed and (in a Cree Nation context) adopted by the youngest son of Chief Piapot, Emile Piapot and his wife, Clara Starblanket Piapot, who added to Sainte-Marie's cultural value and place in native culture.
In 1968, she married a Hawaiian surfing teacher named Dewain Bugbee and they divorced in 1971. She married Sheldon Wolfchild from Minnesota in 1975; they have a son, Dakota "Cody" Starblanket Wolfchild. They divorced. She married Jack Nitzsche, her co-writer of "Up Where We Belong" on March 19, 1982; they were married for seven years. Sainte-Marie has characterized the relationship as abusive and controlling; she left their home in Los Angeles out of fear for her and her son's safety. She also blames Nitzsche for the stagnation of her career during this time.
Although not a Baháʼí herself, she became an active friend of the Baháʼí faith and has appeared at concerts, conferences and conventions of that religion. In 1992, she appeared in the musical event prelude to the Baháʼí World Congress, a double concert "Live Unity: The Sound of the World" in 1992 with video broadcast and documentary. In the video documentary of the event Sainte-Marie is seen on the Dini Petty Show explaining the Baháʼí teaching of progressive revelation. She also appears in the 1985 video Mona With The Children by Douglas John Cameron. However, while she supports a universal sense of religion, she does not subscribe to any particular religion. I gave a lot of support to Baháʼí people in the '80s and '90s … Baháʼí people, as people of all religions, is something I'm attracted to … I don't belong to any religion. … I have a huge religious faith or spiritual faith but I feel as though religion … is the first thing that racketeers exploit. … But that doesn't turn me against religion …
Career
Sainte-Marie taught herself to play piano and guitar in her childhood and teen years. In college some of her songs, "Ananias", the Indian lament "Now That the Buffalo's Gone", and "Mayoo Sto Hoon" (a cover of a Hindi Bollywood song "Mayus To Hoon Waade Se Tere" sung by the Indian singer Mohammed Rafi from the 1960 movie Barsaat Ki Raat) were already in her repertoire.