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Buffy Sainte-Marie Stripped of Honorary Degree Over Native American Ancestry Dispute

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On Wednesday, May 13, the University of Toronto announced that it had rescinded Sainte-Marie’s honorary Doctor of Laws degree.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.

Sainte-Marie rose to fame in the ’60s with folk songs like “Universal Solider,” “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” “Until It’s Time for You to Go,” “My Country ‘Tis of Thy People You’re Dying,” and more. She co-wrote “Up Where We Belong,” which won an Academy Award for Best Original Song for the film An Officer and a Gentleman in 1983. Additionally, she appeared as a recurring guest on Sesame Street from 1975 to 1981, during which she shared her Cree heritage and performed songs.

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.”

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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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