I’ve followed her since 1967, bought her records and CDs, seen her in concert, even bought her recent Canada Post Stamp special issue. Is she, now, just/merely another Grey Owl-styled, white European native impersonator going back to her arrival on the folk scene in 1962 in New England?
Since I began following her, she has long struck me as the ‘real thing’: a beautiful, talented native woman who looks, speaks, sings, dresses memorably and convincingly as a First Nations person. She doesn’t seem to have a phony bone in her and has long sincerely and honestly written about and represented native peoples. She has never said anything publicly about not being native.
When I listen to her perform, especially on her last two albums, I hear a contemporary First Nations woman-performer. If anything, she has become more upfront and vocal about native rights and native spirit. She has long been a passionate woman-artist who never seemed or appeared to be anything remotely ‘colonial’ or ‘European’.
Strange things, accidents (switched or adopted babies), and obfuscations have sometimes happened in the mists of the past. Buffy claims she does not fully know her biological story and seems adamantly sincere about this. In the past, she has always spoken honestly and this may be the time, given her long admirable and impressive record, to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she is who she feels herself to be.
To me, Buffy remains native, complete with her Saskatchewan Piapot family connections. She has also long been accepted as being native by many native people who maybe intuit better what CBC journalists might not possibly know. My own personal intuition is that Buffy is no Grey Owl playing unconvincing games and deliberately misleading the public and media on what she feels and knows in her spiritual bones to be true. And her fierce honesty, integrity and consistency go back seven long decades.
(1968 concert program)
