Buffy St. Marie's Indian Mask

There’s some things you like to write, and there’s some you don’t, but you have to because they’re large things you can’t ignore, and because you’re a writer. This is one of the second ones.

I grew up believing in a lot of stuff that wasn’t true. But I learned as I went along the truth about things, like that Jesus wasn’t actually god, just a man, a smart, caring man, but a man. I learned Moses wasn’t real at all, he was a mythological figure, possibly a conglomerate of actual figures. I learned that Shakespeare didn’t write the Shakespeare plays, a nobleman named Edward DeVere wrote them, anonymously. I learned that the universe wasn’t sensible, stable and eternal, like Einstein thought, it was expanding, huge but finite and extremely weird. I learned that the grown-up people who were running things didn’t really know what they were doing half the time, or more than half the time. I learned that this very beautiful earth we live on wasn’t indestructible, it was very destructible, and we humans were just the ones who could do it. I learned that Bob Dylan lied his pants off early on, about the carnivals and rodeos and riding trains like a hobo, saying his parents were dead, when they in fact came to see him at Carnegie Hall. After a while, I came to expect that nothing at all was how it appeared. That was the only truth I could finally cull out of all of these constantly crumbling facades.

Now we have another one, a rather staggering one, considering its depth and timespan and complete acceptance in our culture. Buffy St. Marie, known worldwide as an Indian singer, performer, activist and advocate, is not now and never has been an Indian, not by blood. That she was able to carry on for an entire lifetime wearing a fraudulent mask is a psychological study that could tell us volumes about the malleability of the human psyche. This is a person who did great good for Indian affairs, stood at the forefront of consciousness raising and the demand for respect and recognition of the country’s indigenous peoples, who looked the part and played the part and no one in the world questioned her part, yet the entire time was a fake representative of those very people she championed. It’s profoundly deflating. It makes you shake your head and not say anything, because there’s no good way to address it.

In actuality Buffy St Marie in grew up in a suburban household in Wakefield, Mass, which is the next town over from where I grew up. This was white bread America, as pure as it was. Bill Russell moved to my hometown, Reading, Mass, at the height of his fame with the Celtics, and was greeted by no official welcome from the town, but instead by disdain, derision and eventually racist attacks on his home. This was not an easy place for people who were different. An adopted Indian girl would have stood out in Wakefield like a circus attraction, but no one took any notice.

There’s a preserved, original hospital birth certificate, signed by her doctor, of one Beverly Jean Santamaria, born to a family with an Italian father. Her parents and siblings thought her claims of being Indian, as she was becoming famous, were just for the publicity, but various family members have attested that she wasn’t adopted, she was naturally born to their family and has no Indian ancestry. As she became famous, she used her money and power to squelch any attempt on their part to tell the true story.

She looked perfect for the part, though viewed in retrospect, if you take away the long black hair, beads, the Indian dress - you’ve got a striking Italian girl.

Going back to those times, the 60’s, the world was in a revolution, musically. The folk boom, just before the invasion of the Beatles, was all about authenticity. Which is why Bob Dylan made up colorful tales about himself and his past, when he was in fact the son of a furniture salesman from Duluth, Minn. If you didn’t have a past to fit your style in those days, you made one up. They were harmless lies. Mostly. As far as Buffy, one can see how easily it could have been to make it up and allow it to grow. Someone asks, “Are you Indian? You look like you’re an Indian.” She pauses, says yes. Maybe she could have imagined she had some Indian blood. So the story grew. She benefited greatly from it, since she was the indigenous folk singer, instantly identified, unquestionably real, as deeply authentic as one gets. A Native American, the first people here, and everything that implied. Her career soared and continued to sustain itself for decades, all on the singular platform of her Indian identity. She was undeniably talented, but as an Italian folk singer, St. Marie would have had a fraction of the chance for the success she enjoyed as a ‘real’ Indian. So that’s what she became.

It’s the magnitude of it, however, how she played it out until it became such an overwhelming part of her essential being, a complete transformation - that is the very stuff of fiction, a story more nuanced and complex than the Great Gatsby. This is a pioneer of Indian rights, someone standing fist raised at demonstrations, leading people to tears by her speeches and songs, loved, embraced by Indian people as their own, as someone famous and successful who they can point to, all the while adopting the persona so completely that no one ever doubted it - except her family, who knew the truth. Then a journalist named Jacqueline Keeler, a member of the Navaho Nation, recently watched the new documentary about St. Marie’s life and thought something wasn’t right. She recognized the behavior of a ‘Pretendian’ in St. Marie, and with a colleague’s help, discovered Buffy’s true birth certificate.

So the story became revealed and exploded in the news. It’s mind boggling to me. I have trouble processing it. How can a small lie be allowed to grow to such gigantic proportions? How can someone act the part of someone they aren’t for an entire lifetime? How can someone keep pretending in the face of caring souls, like those in the Piapot First Nation, who took her in, adopted her as their own. How can you sit there across from them and talk and laugh and accept hospitality and unconditional love and know all the time you’re completely fake? An abject liar. A play actor. A Pretendian.

Surely Shakespearean in its reach and psychological complexity. I feel for Buffy, because at the end of her life, to have this come to light and stain everything she’s done must be devastating. I worry, because in the wake of these undeniable disclosures, she still adamantly claims her Indian identity, displaying a dangerous degree of self-delusion. I’ve always been an admirer and fan. It hurts me personally. I also feel revulsion for her charade, and if I feel this way as a white person, I can’t imagine how all of this hurts Indian people.

It’s a tragedy of fame and folly, of telling a lie so often you no longer know it is. A lie that she must have told herself over and over again was a lie for the sake of good.

But in the end, there’s no such thing.