I watched the CBC Fifth Estate exposé. A primer on an issue I hadn't heard of before. Pretendians.
Buffy was already talented and performing when she went to the pivotal pow-wow in her early 20s during the 60s. She didn't need the indigenous badge. Didn't someone quote Johnny Cash as saying native identity alone would not guarantee higher pay, and was more often, for the longest time, an albatross round wearers' necks preventing regular social opportunities.?
I think most people know that birth certificates do not necessarily reflect true parentage. Zoom2G or someone said Buffy's Caucasian mother had an affair with someone of Native American ancestry around the time she was born. I wonder why the programme omitted that salient information. It sounds like there was always a question mark.
The way Buffy was accepted by the Piapot Cree family from the time of the pow-wow onward, and her embrace of their welcome, stands on its own merit as a sort of rebirth.
Many artists use their own as well as others' identities as part of their creations. They make things up. They generally take greater liberties with reality. You could argue that's their job. It came up for List of the Lost. How do you represent the other's experience authentically? Do you you even have any right to, if you're not the one who has lived what the art describes? If the answer is no, it's easy to see how limited art would then become.
The legal letter sent to her brother's family was serious, but why had he taken it upon himself before that to embark on an energetic public campaign to dispute her claims about belonging to her newfound clan? That seems quite malicious and destructive, and there's something admirable about her bravery to square up to him and get him to cease and desist.
Was Buffy at least sincere enough to avoid harming the people she claimed to belong to if her belief about her origins were inaccurate? Most would say she brought much-needed attention to issues. The fruits of her actions are virtuous.
The impressions I formed of the people going after her and accusing her of misrepresentation were of narrowminded obsessiveness, and mean glee. They displayed an undue faith in state data and failure to grasp the imprecisions and grey areas of people, families, institutions and shifting mores. They mention some gaining handsomely from grants, subsidies and other awards by waving an indigenous label. Those situations need to be clarified. There are always deliberate bad actors. Buffy gets the benefit of my doubt. Keep the records!
An apt poem;
Fallen Leaves
by
Mary Cornelia Hartshorne
An Indian Grandmother’s Parable
Many times in my life I have heard the white sages,
Who are learned in the knowledge and lore of past ages,
Speak of my people with pity, say, “Gone is their hour
Of dominion. By the strong wind of progress their power,
Like a rose past its brief time of blooming, lies shattered;
Like the leaves of the oak tree its people are scattered.”
This is the eighty-first autumn since I can remember.
Again fall the leaves, born in April and dead by December;
Riding the whimsied breeze, zigzagging and whirling,
Coming to earth at last and slowly upcurling,
Withered and sapless and brown, into discarded fragments,
Of what once was life; dry, chattering parchments
That crackle and rustle like old women’s laughter
When the merciless wind with swift feet coming after
Will drive them before him with unsparing lashes
’Til they are crumbled and crushed into forgotten ashes;
Crumbled and crushed, and piled deep in the gulches and hollows,
Soft bed for the yet softer snow that in winter fast follows
But when in the spring the light falling
Patter of raindrops persuading, insistently calling,
Wakens to life again forces that long months have slumbered,
There will come whispering movement, and green things unnumbered
Will pierce through the mould with their yellow-green, sun-searching fingers,
Fingers—or spear-tips, grown tall, will bud at another year’s breaking,
One day when the brooks, manumitted by sunshine, are making
Music like gold in the spring of some far generation.
And up from the long-withered leaves, from the musty stagnation,
Life will climb high to the furthermost leaflets.
The bursting of catkins asunder with greed for the sunlight; the thirsting
Of twisted brown roots for earth-water; the gradual unfolding
Of brilliance and strength in the future, earth’s bosom is holding
Today in those scurrying leaves, soon to be crumpled and broken.
Let those who have ears hear my word and be still. I have spoken.
- https://poets.org/poem/fallen-leaves