Seems like a good moment to repost this.
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Regarding recent allegations that Buffy Saint Marie is a vile pretendian, a statement from her adoptive family. Which really should be the last word on the issue.
Statement_from.the_Piapot_ Family.
Our names are Debra Piapot, and Ntawnis Piapot. We are direct descendants of Chief Piapot, and we are just two of the many people ofthe Piapot First Nation who call Buffy Sainte-Marie our relative, She is our Auntie, our relative, and a beloved member of the Piapot family and community.
The accusations which are about to be made of our Auntie Buffy are hurtful, ignorant, colonial – and racist.
No one, including Canada and its governments, the Indian Act, institutions, media or any person anywhere can deny our family’s inherent right to determine who is a member of our family and community.
Nimosom (our grandfather), Emile Piapot, son of Chief Piapot (Treaty 4 Adhesion signatory) and nohkom (our grandmother) Clara Starblanket, daughter of Chief Starblanket (Treaty 4 signatory) adopted Buffy before we were even born or when we were small children. The adoption was conducted in the Nehiyawpwatak – Cree of way and she was given her spirit name according to our ways.
Our ways are so beautiful and profoundly
inclusive. Our grandparents fllled the holes in their hearts by adopting Bufy after losing several children to illness and disease, some as a result of the Indian Act pass system that denied requests for medical help in Regina.We spent our entire lives together with Buffy as a family, decades together, and we will continue to love and support one another. She has been committed to our family and community and has worked tirelessly to inspire, support, uplift our family, and share our community knowledge and ways and those of other
Indigenous Peoples all over the world.We grew up knowing that Buffy and our grandparents adopted each other and how deeply committed and loving they were to one another. We heard from older family about how my grandmother cried when she had to leave after an extended family visit on our homelands or after the pow-wow.
Buffy is our family. We chose her and she chose us. We claim her as a member of our family and all of our family members are from the Piapot First Nation. To us, that holds far more weight than any paper
documentation or colonial record keeping ever could.We are a sovereign nation, a sovereign people. Canada does not get to determine who we claim as family, and neither does the media.
It is up to us to determine who is a member of our community and our family. Every understanding of our spiritual practices, the history our grandparents shared with us, and the traditions of the Cree refute your suggestion that our Auntie Buffy, is not Indigenous, or a member of our community.
The Creator will recognize her for who she is by the name we gave her as a member of our family. Join us in protecting our right to uphold who we claim as family through our traditions and natural laws.
Respectfully.
Debra & Ntawnis Piapot
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That right there should be enough…
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Well this is kind of a big disappointing fakeout. At first glance it looks like Native American population numbers are going up, which is always nice news to hear when you’re talking about any group that was nearly genocided right off the face of the Earth.
Then it gets to this:
While the answer might seem obvious — Native Americans are having more babies than everyone else — their population spike “probably was not the result of good old-fashioned procreation,” Andrew Van Damn wrote for the Post. He noted that Native Americans "had the lowest fertility rate of any group measured last year […] The more likely answer is that people “who previously identified as white are now claiming to be Native American”
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But the problem with that is that just because someone identifies as Native doesn’t mean that they are automatically enrolled in a particular tribe or nation. So, if the US census is counting people who just say that they are part Native, but they’re not enrolled in a tribe, that seems suspect. The US census SHOULD go by the number of enrollees, not by how people self-identify in this particular case.
Although the article does make a point about unrecognized tribes, too…
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It does seem suspect, but it also would feel wrong to disallow people from self-identifying as Native American for basic census purposes (as opposed to tribal benefits) while people who self-identify as any other racial/ethnic group are taken at their word.
I don’t have a great answer. Mostly I’m just disappointed to read that what briefly appeared to be some kind of comeback/recovery story really wasn’t.
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I’m not sure about posting this here, other than that it illustrates how the meaning of indigenous is very much contested, especially against the backdrop of truly genocidal policies aimed at erasing entire cultures… I don’t know what the truth here is, but I know that many have found Buffy Saint-Marie to be a inspirational figure through out her career.
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I am really disturbed by this part of the story about the CBC, and what exactly led to this effort described as…
reporting “pretendian” stories
TPTB at a news outlet decided “the public” wants to know something about influential people who have benefited from being identified as indigenous, so they’re going to investigate (without their “high bar” stooping low enough to respect oral tradition or speaking to tribal leaders) and expose people based on their criteria so “the audience can decide.” WTAF 
It led me to look at the editor’s background, and this recent scandal about directing journalists to change terms used to describe certain groups immediately popped up. He sounds like a bro who would do a lot to increase “engagement” in digital media, regardless of whether or not it’s at someone else’s expense. There’s no undoing the damage this causes and they’ve probably got a list of people about to get dragged in the same way, because look how much attention this brought them.
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Yeah, I thought that was really fucked up, too. The article I posted also talks about how those who adopted her were sort of ignored…
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What is it about men in power who decide they just have to gatekeep membership of groups to which they don’t belong? I keep thinking about Dawes, “one drop”/fractional categorization, orientation, and gender. There seems to be no end to this with some folks.
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Saw this with John Two-Hawks. The weird “not Native enough” as defined by white people is pretty much always wrong.
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