The Governor General’s office has terminated singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Order of Canada.
The move was announced in the Canada Gazette, the federal government’s official newspaper in which it publishes the text of new laws, regulations and other notices and decisions.
The move comes after a CBC report in 2023 questioned Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous heritage, saying it found a birth certificate that indicated she was born in 1941 in Massachusetts and listed that both her and her parents as white.
“Notice is hereby given that the appointment of Buffy Sainte-Marie to the Order of Canada was terminated by Ordinance signed by the Governor General on January 3, 2025,” a short message, published on the Gazette website on Feb. 8, read.
Family members in the U.S., including a younger sister, told CBC that Sainte-Marie does not have Indigenous ancestry, nor was she adopted.
FILE – Buffy Sainte-Marie performs at the Americana Music Honors and Awards show in 2015, in Nashville, Tenn.
AP Photo / Mark Zaleski
Sainte-Marie, 83, pushed back against the CBC investigation shortly after it made national headlines, saying the outlet’s The Fifth Estate episode was full of omissions and mistakes.
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“Being an ‘Indian’ has little to do with sperm tracking and colonial record keeping: it has to do with community, culture, knowledge, teachings, who claims you, who you love, who loves you and who’s your family,” Sainte-Marie said in a written statement to The Canadian Press at the time.
She also said she “will not stoop to respond to every false allegation” and that she’d “heard from countless people with similar stories who do not know where they are from and feel victimized by these allegations.”
Sainte-Marie also posted video to her social media accounts ahead of the CBC’s reporting, saying she has shared her story for 60 years and called herself a “proud member of the Native community with deep roots in Canada.”
“But there are also many things I don’t know, which I’ve always been honest about. I don’t know where I’m from, who my birth parents are or how I ended up a misfit in a typical white Christian New England home,” she said in the video.
“I realized decades ago that I would never have the answers.”
Sainte-Marie’s official website once said she was “believed to have been born in 1941 on the Piapot First Nation reserve in Saskatchewan and taken from her biological parents when she was an infant.”
Ntawnis Piapot, the great-granddaughter of Emile Piapot and Clara Starblanket, both deceased, who adopted Sainte-Marie, told Global News at the time that the claim Sainte-Marie has no Indigenous ancestry has no bearing on her belonging to a Cree family.
Buffy Sainte-Marie is pictured (centre) with Emile Piapot and Clara Starblanket.
Buffy Sainte-Marie / Facebook
“The adoption process, it took years — it took days and months and years of getting to know each other and trusting each other and going to ceremony and getting her Indian name (from my mushum) to finally look at her and be like, I acknowledge you as my daughter, you’re officially part of our family.”
It was done in Cree custom, Piapot said, and while Sainte-Marie didn’t claim proof of blood relations, she is accepted as kin because of that ceremony.
“It’s really insulting that someone would question my great grandfather’s choice and right to adopt Buffy as his daughter,” Piapot told Global News.
“No one has the authority to question our sovereignty, we are a sovereign nation, we are sovereign people and our adoption practices have been intact since time immemorial.
“Having someone question the validity of that adoption… it’s hurtful, it’s ignorant, it’s colonial, and quite frankly it’s racist.”
Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous culture was a central part of her identity as she rose to fame in the 1960s, and she has won awards including multiple Junos and the Polaris Music Prize in 2015.
Among her many accolades, Sainte-Marie won an Oscar in 1983 for best original song, starred on six seasons of Sesame Street, influencing the show’s storylines, and founded the Nihewan Foundation — an organization dedicated to improving education of and about Indigenous people and cultures.
She retired from performing in 2023, citing health reasons.
Global News has reached out to her publicist for comment, but did not immediately hear back.
— With files from Global News’ Melissa Ridgen and The Associated Press
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
