One year after the Buffy Sainte-Marie investigation, what's changed for Indigenous artists?

It's been just over a year since the CBC's The Fifth Estate aired its documentary about Buffy Sainte-Marie that raised questions about her claim to Indigenous ancestry. Though the musician pushed back against these allegations, it nonetheless created a reckoning around questions of Indigenous identity. 

On today's Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, we take stock of what's shifted in Indigenous art and music since the film came out. Elamin is joined by Michelle Cyca, a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation in Treaty 6 and freelance journalist who has written about false claims of Indigenous ancestry, and Marc Meriläinen, an Ojibway musician and producer, who also created a program that aims to verify the identity of Indigenous musicians.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Michelle, a year removed from it now, how are you feeling about it? 

Michelle: Buffy is so beloved by people. She'd been in the public eye for decades. So she is a part of my life and my dad's life, she meant a lot to people of multiple generations. And I think that there is a real grief with that one. Buffy really felt for a lot of people like it changed something that was meaningful to them. I watched her on Sesame Street when I was little, and I think she was the first Cree person I ever saw on TV. And so I think that just felt sad, it felt like it damaged something that was special. A year since, I feel like it's still lingering in some ways for people. I have a children's book that Buffy Sainte-Marie wrote and I don't take it out to read to my daughter anymore. 

Elamin: How are you thinking about her performances and her music now? 

Michelle: I think I'll probably never be able to listen to them in the same way…. I think you could make an argument for separating the art from the artist in some cases. But with Buffy, they are really bound up together, who she was was a big part of why her work mattered to people. It's hard for me to engage in the same way. I don't know if I'll ever really be able to separate those things. 

But I think people are trying to figure out how to move on. And I think one thing that I thought about in the aftermath of that was how many Indigenous artists maybe were overlooked because Buffy had such a big spotlight on her. She was the Indigenous musician for so long. And maybe instead of focusing on that, we can think about all the other Indigenous creatives who could be lifted up and get more recognition now that there's a space to fill. 

Elamin: Marc, one year after the Buffy story, do you think we're any closer to understanding why someone might falsely claim Indigenous identity? 

Marc: Our research found a lot of different sorts of reasons why people might try to pretend to be Indigenous. Because if you look at 20, 30 years ago, nobody was pretending to be us. I mean, even we didn't want to be us at certain points of history, right?

So I think for some people, it's a desire for belonging. They want to belong to a strong cultural group, maybe they're lacking that in their lives. Definitely for other people, it's financial incentives. They see different grants that may be available to them, or they feel that there's less of a pool of applicants in certain programs where they have a better chance of succeeding. Also, I think for some people it's just incorrect family lore. This goes back to high school, the someone I knew, my best friend, they were told they were Italian. It turns out there weren't even that, they were Portuguese, once they researched. So again, their story is incorrect family lore. And I think a lot of that is lending to some of these pretending in the sort of stories. And also I think there's just a disassociation from whiteness. You have a lot of people now wanting to get away from certain groups or certain perceptions, and they find something romantic about this sort of Indigenous culture, lifestyle, experience that they want to be a part of. 

Elamin: We are in a moment when we are, I think, better than we used to be at making a lot of room for Indigenous artists. Also at the same time, we are in a moment where these questions are maybe coming up more than ever for Indigenous artists, and it can be a cloud that hangs over some of them. As you think about this moment and Indigenous artists that you know that you work with, do you think it has changed the meaning of being an Indigenous artist right now to operate in this ecosystem? 

Marc: I think so, for sure, because a lot of Indigenous artists I know they're always trying to give back and honour their community. It's not just extraction from Indigenous grants or scholarships or other opportunities. They're putting 110% back into trying to build their own community members up, whether it's becoming a success and then being that inspiration or that role model that they need back home at their rez to inspire the youth to do something great with their lives, then that's all great. But it also is a very tricky time for us, as well, because with the "pretendians" [someone falsely claiming Indigenous identity] out there doing their thing, a lot of our artistic directors and other programmers I've talked to, they're actually hesitant about booking Indigenous artists because they don't want to have the backlash or accidentally book a "pretendian" or whatever the case may be. 

So these are very interesting times, but I remain optimistic. We're looking out for each other and we're trying to educate non-Indigenous Canadians and everyone alike about certain red flags to look out for. And keep supporting Indigenous artists in your community and across the nation from coast to coast to coast. There's a lot of great talent out there that has yet to be discovered. So let's not let this little bump in the road set us back. 

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Kaitlin King and Jess Low.