Buffy Sainte-Marie — the Oscar-winning folk singer who claims to be an Indigenous woman of Cree descent — was recently stripped of an honorary degree over an ancestry dispute.
On Wednesday, May 13, the University of Toronto announced that it had rescinded Sainte-Marie’s honorary Doctor of Laws degree. She received the honor in 2019 for her “excellence in the arts, as a singer-songwriter, actress and visual artist.”
The decision, approved on May 13, came more than two years after the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) aired a documentary from The Fifth Estate alleging that Sainte-Marie lied about her Native American ancestry. In it, a birth certificate indicated that she was born in Massachusetts to Italian-American parents. Family members also confirmed this.
However, Sainte-Marie, 85, insisted in March 2025 that although she is an American citizen with a U.S. passport, she was adopted as a young adult by a Cree family.
In November 2023, Billboard Canada published a statement from Sainte-Marie, just two months after she announced her retirement from live performances. “I have never lied about my identity,” she insisted. “The more I’ve known, the more I’ve pieced together a sense of self from what information has been available to me.”
Sainte-Marie continued, “What I know about my Indigenous ancestry I learned from my growing up mother, who was of Mi’kmaq heritage, and my own research later in life. My mother told me that I was adopted and that I was Native, but there was no documentation as was common for Indigenous children at the time.”
After detailing how she was adopted into a Cree family as an adult, she admitted, “I have always struggled to answer questions about who I am. For decades, I tried to find my birth parents and information about my background.”
Sainte-Marie explained, “Through that research what became clear, and what I’ve always been honest about: I don’t know where I’m from or who my birth parents are, and I will never know. Which is why, to be questioned in this way is painful, both for me, and for my two families I love so dearly.”
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Originally published on tvinsider.com, part of the BLOX Digital Content Exchange.
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