Buffy Sainte-Marie’s biography on her official website no longer claims she is a Cree woman ”likely” born on Saskatchewan’s Piapot First Nation.

The changes follow a recent CBC investigation which questioned the 82-year-old’s long-held claim to Cree ancestry.

 

 

According to an online archive of web pages, as recently as early November, the biography twice described her as a ”Cree singer-songwriter,” who ”is 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.”

Sainte-Marie was also described as ”the first Indigenous person to ever win an Oscar for writing the hit song, ”Up Where We Belong” from the movie ”An Officer and a Gentleman.”

The biography also said that in 1998, she ”received the Native Americans in Philanthropy’s Louis T. Delgado Award for Native American Philanthropist of the Year.”

Those claims have been deleted from the website.

Piapot First Nation acting Chief Ira Lavallee thinks Buffy Sainte-Marie should take a DNA test to answer the question about her heritage once and for all.