THERE’S NO OFFICIAL record of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s birth, not really. At least not a satisfactory and decisive one that answers questions before they’re asked, grounded in a family lineage with all the gifts and baggage that accompany that kind of belonging.

She was born with the given name Beverly, mostly likely in 1941, on or around February 20th, and probably on a reserve called Piapot in the Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan. She is Cree, and to be born Cree in the 1940s in Canada was to be a person who was not always counted, at least not in a formal and legal fashion. Birth records from the time, particularly on reserves, were spotty, and there are countless reports of records being lost or destroyed. The children who, like Buffy Sainte-Marie, were adopted or taken had their birth stories erased, stolen by people whose motivations were rooted in misconceptions and who thought their whiteness and their faith made them superior. Chelsea Vowel, a Métis writer and educator from the Plains Cree–speaking community of Lac Ste. Anne, Alberta, who publishes under the name âpihtawikosisân, refers to processes like this as “adoption as cultural annihilation.”¹

The combination of religious hubris and colonizer supremacy shaped the belief that Indigenous people needed to adapt to white society, and while many Indigenous children were sent to residential schools, others were taken from their parents and adopted into white homes. Sainte-Marie was adopted out of her reserve—for reasons that are still unclear, muddied by time and a lack of accurate records—by Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie, a mechanic and a newspaper copy editor, respectively. They were a modest, visibly white family (though Winifred identified as part Mi’kmaq) who for much of Sainte-Marie’s childhood lived in a trailer by Sebago Lake in Maine and in North Reading and Wakefield, Massachusetts.

Sainte-Marie discovered a love and natural talent for the piano and composition when she was just three years old, waiting out her older brother’s lessons. “All he wanted to do was play baseball, but for a few months somebody made him take piano lessons, poor thing,” she says. “But I would listen to him practice his lesson, and I couldn’t wait for him to get gone and leave and go play baseball so that I could take over the piano and play not only his whole lesson by ear, but what I really wanted to play, which was anything in my head.”

A teacher advised against music lessons for Sainte-Marie, thinking it would discourage her natural abilities, so she began to improvise music to an illustrated book of Christmas songs and poems. “I’d sit there at my piano and I’d either be making up stories in my head and playing to them, or I’d be looking at the pictures in the book and making the music be the characters,” she recalls. “I was expressing the emotions of the pictures and making up little-kid stories. And actually, I was scoring in my head these books of nursery rhymes.”

Sainte-Marie identifies as “musically dyslexic,” a condition she learned about from a Berklee College of Music professor in the 1990s. It’s similar to dyscalculia, an inability to use symbols in arithmetical calculations. She can’t read music, but she can accurately write down the music she hears in her head—she just can’t read it back the next day. Every note she’s ever played, arranged, composed, or produced is by ear and memory, gut and feel.

“All I’ve been able to do is improvise because I never took any lessons,” she explains. “I don’t read [music], and I was never boxed in that way. But I was kind of ashamed of the way I played when I was a kid. So I wouldn’t play for people. I played all the time at home, but I kind of thought it was low-rent amateur-y because it didn’t have a store price tag on it.”

Janice Murphy Palumbo, Sainte-Marie’s childhood best friend, remembers being a little jealous of her pal Beverly’s musical talents, even as a kid. “She could sit down at the piano and just play anything,” Palumbo says with a laugh. “I had taken lessons, and I was awful. I always felt awkward. I just couldn’t be bothered if I couldn’t be an expert right off the bat. [Beverly] would come over and sit there at the old-fashioned upright and play anything by ear, and my parents loved her.”

Sainte-Marie and Palumbo’s families were both on the lower end of middle-class. The friends walked to school together, rode horses once a year, and went to ballroom dancing classes like the other kids did. “I never heard her say a bad word about anyone in my entire life, ever in all the years,” Palumbo says. “She just always had that sweet smile on her face. And you know, [she was] just a nice, nice girl.” Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous ancestry didn’t come up much, but Palumbo says that what people in Wakefield held against her was her family’s lower-middle-class status. “It was a very cliquey, snotty town,” Palumbo says. “It was right down the middle; we were on the right side of town, but we didn’t have the money that the other [kids] had to do things.”

Palumbo remembers that girls, in particular, were very cold and ignored them both. “We were in Girl Scouts, up at the higher end of town, with the beautiful homes and all, and I remember one day the girls saying their mothers didn’t want them to associate with Beverly,” she recalls, acknowledging that this could have been where racism started to manifest more directly. “I remember going home and telling my mother that Karen and Sue and Nancy’s mothers didn’t like Beverly. My mother was furious. She loved her. She was a nice kid, she played piano beautifully, and she was a good, loyal friend. But that’s when I remember the distinction.”

Sainte-Marie’s own relationship to her town and her family was complicated. Ideally, home represents idyllic basics—belonging, safety, love—but that wasn’t her experience. She didn’t know who she was or where she came from, and there were few people who looked like her in the predominantly white Wakefield. Her existence provoked questions that no one knew how to ask, and it only made her more isolated and vulnerable.

“At various stages of my life, I refused to believe that my mother was not my true biological mother,” Sainte-Marie says. “I was told that I was adopted. I was told that I was just born on the ‘wrong side of the blanket.’ In other words, one of my parents was my parent and one wasn’t. I was told that we were part-Indian, but nobody knew anything about it, and when I grew up, I could find out about it if I was interested, which worked out very well. I had this identity question, but it wasn’t something that was haunting me or getting at me until far later in my life.”

The fact that she was adopted wasn’t openly acknowledged in Sainte-Marie’s earliest years, but her older brother used that information to bully her when she was very little. Gradually, by listening to what was said and what wasn’t between family members, Sainte-Marie understood that she was both adopted and Indigenous. Winifred didn’t talk much about the former, but she wholly embraced the latter and encouraged her daughter to find out everything she could about the world, including Indigenous culture and the real history of Indigenous people, not just the sanitized North American version that persisted in school books.

Sainte-Marie now laughingly calls the town where she went to school “Javex, USA” because it was a white colonial town where everyone was either Catholic or Protestant. There were a few Jewish people, but there wasn’t much diversity aside from that, and there was little education or awareness about what being Indigenous meant. Sainte-Marie can’t recall knowing another person of color in her small town. “I didn’t know any Black people. There was one family who was Puerto Rican, and everybody was always reminding you that they weren’t really Black; they were Puerto Rican. I look back on that town not with negativity in that way, but with understanding of what their ignorance was like, because I was living right in it.”

However, it was alienating. With her dark hair and tan skin, Sainte-Marie was already visibly identifiable as an outsider. She was small for her age and often a target of neighborhood bullies, beaten up by boys and older girls. “There were reservations in Maine that you wouldn’t hear about, but for the most part, people didn’t mention reservations or Indians or anything except in the same way that they would mention the Salem Witch Trials, the Boston Tea Party—in other words, like historical references [that were] all over now.” She was told in school that “Indians didn’t exist,” yet relatives in her mother’s family expressed pride that they were “part-Indian.” Sainte-Marie laughs. “That’s the way they would put it.” Today, it’s not a word she cares for, but she says she’s “used ‘Indian’ all my life so it doesn’t bother me as much.” Her family’s addition of the word “part” reminds her of a joke that her friend, Oneida-Mohawk-Cree comedian/writer Charlie Hill told her later in life: “‘Oh, yeah, yeah, we’re Indians, but we don’t really practice it, you know?’ As if it’s being a lapsed Catholic or something!”

While Sainte-Marie knew she was Indigenous, she didn’t have a lot of information about what that meant. School books told her that people who looked like her no longer existed, but she knew that wasn’t true—she was proof of that. Encouraged by her mother to ask questions and do her own research about what it meant to be Indigenous, Sainte-Marie would ride her bike four miles around the lake to visit the only other visibly Native American person near her town, a Narragansett man named Leonard Bayrd. (The Narragansett are an Algonquin tribe from Rhode Island.) Bayrd, whom Sainte-Marie describes as “really nice,” ran a trading post in the town stocked with his own handicrafts and was also the mailman. Sainte-Marie would spend hours visiting him and his wife, just feeling safe in their company, listening to his stories and asking questions. Sainte-Marie says there was “no Indian agenda.” Bayrd was welcoming and helped provide some shape to Sainte-Marie’s earliest education about their shared Indigeneity in a world that worked hard to make them invisible. “Nobody believed in his tribe either,” Sainte-Marie says. “We were invisible. Native American people were invisible.”

Bayrd was proud of his beadwork, which Sainte-Marie says appeared in Hollywood films, and she loved to bead alongside him. He couldn’t give her answers about her identity, but he could give her a sense of reality beyond the narrow parameters society provided. “He couldn’t help me out with knowing who I’m related to and who I’m not, but that has always been just something that’s part of my life,” Sainte-Marie explains.

When she was a child, “it wasn’t talked about that I looked different. But my brother told me; he let me know in no uncertain terms that my mom was not my mom and that I didn’t belong in that family.” Sainte-Marie heard it over and over. Every time, Winifred would tell her young daughter some variation of “He’s mistaken.”

She took refuge inside her mother’s hasty reassurances. It was one of the first pieces of psychological armor Sainte-Marie learned to put on. “I loved my mother so much, I just wanted her to be my mother, and I didn’t know what was correct,” Sainte-Marie says. Every time Sainte-Marie went to her mother to talk about things her brother said and did to her, Winifred brushed it off as teasing. Winifred didn’t know that what she thought was teasing was actually the groundwork for something much darker and more predatory.

Sainte-Marie was abused for years by both her older brother and an older male relative who did not live in the house. The mistreatment from her brother expanded from verbal and psychological bullying to physical and sexual abuse. “And, you know, I’m no dummy. Later on, I would think about it and, as a little girl I was being—my brain was being—influenced and operated on by a boy who was five-and-a-half years older than me. Do you know what a ten-year-old can do to a five-year-old—to the body and self-esteem of a five-year-old? To their psyche and confidence? What a boy going through puberty can do to a little unprotected girl? It’s a very, very big problem for little girls who are in a situation like that.”

Unfortunately, her brother wasn’t her only problem. “I had the other side of pedophilia [too], coming from someone else much older, a grown-up in the family who was not a bully, just a horny old man,” Sainte-Marie says. The older relative didn’t live in her home, and she didn’t have to see him frequently, but the sexual abuse lasted for years. “I’ve read some things where somebody accused of pedophilia will say, ‘The kid liked it.’ Okay. That one [justification] gets kicked out right away. Children are born with sexuality. Things feel good. Sexual abuse of an innocent child imprints a confusing unequal relationship imbalance. There are things that the public doesn’t know about child abuse, and it’s not about how far he stuck it in. It’s about power and control over girls. Pretty nasty, isn’t it?” The effects of the abuse she experienced lasted in both expected and unexpected ways. “Prematurely sexualizing children is about bullying and emotional exploitation. It cripples children so that they are never really truly comfortable with another person at that level, and sometimes at many other levels,” Sainte-Marie says.

Palumbo didn’t know exactly what was going on with her friend, but she had her suspicions. “Her brother was a total creep,” Palumbo says. “I can remember one time, I stayed overnight at her house and he came into the bedroom and tried to get me to put on roller skates. And I kept falling down and falling down because you can’t put roller skates on a hardwood floor and not trip and fall and all that. He got the biggest kick out of it. He was bad.” She also vividly recalls one of the last times she and Sainte-Marie hung out, when they were thirteen or fourteen. “It was probably before we went to high school, and she came to my house, up in my bedroom,” Palumbo says. “I remember her having a crazy, scared look on her face and talking about things that I really didn’t understand, and she was—it was like she was terrified. I didn’t know how to handle it. I think she was being abused. I don’t know for certain. I just didn’t know what to do. We were innocent back then. I couldn’t have been much of a good friend, but I just didn’t know anything.”

During the abuse, Sainte-Marie would shut down, and sometimes she would pass out. She says she felt an overwhelming need to disappear. She was “disassociating,” she explains, though she didn’t know the word for it at the time. “I just thought that’s the way people were treated, and what you had to do was just get tough and endure it.” She retreated because she didn’t know how else to stay safe. “I didn’t have any idea of it being just plain wrong,” Sainte-Marie says.

Sainte-Marie credits her mother with helping to protect her vulnerability despite the trauma. “My mom didn’t know the details of what my brother was doing to me that made me cry, and she had no idea there was a problem in the other case. But she would see me crying or upset or traumatized and she would say, ‘What? Have they been picking on you again?’ So I thought that’s what sexual abuse was called. And what you were supposed to do when somebody was ‘picking on you’ was to get a thicker skin, don’t worry about it. ‘When you grow up, it won’t be like this. As you get older, you’ll be able to cope better with people’s “bad manners.”’ Fuck. But we were talking about two different things, and she didn’t know it. If we’d been talking about it using the words ‘sexual abuse’ today, she would not have had the same dismissive attitude.”

To escape, Sainte-Marie took refuge in music and nature, two halves of her that subconsciously worked towards wholeness. “I had a real need for privacy and isolation as a child. I wasn’t only some traumatized, scared little kid hiding under the bed—which I was—but I was also this other person who had an inner world that was really, really good. It really was.” She played for hours in the woods, made up songs, and she adored animals. “I was by myself, and that was good. I was happy. There was a cat and a dog, and eventually I had some rabbits, although my brother abused them, too. Animals—that’s where I would put my love, and so I wasn’t unhappy; I was having a good time in my solitude. I was the recluse who needed to think about it, who needed to turn shit into Shinola [a popular shoe polish]. I needed to be able to turn lemons into lemonade. I needed to because I had something inside me that was really, really interesting—to myself!”

In Maine, her family’s trailer was in the middle of the woods next to Sebago Lake state park. “I slept in a jungle hammock—oh, it was my little world.” When the family relocated to Wakefield, Massachusetts, nature continued to be central to Sainte-Marie’s happiness. “My uncle Eddie had a farm in the next town. There was a lake down the street [from my school] and woods right next to my house,” she says. “So I was always really comfortable in the woods. I was happy that I was happy, and I knew it consciously. It was beautiful.”

In the process of turning inward, she found strength and solace. “I had no music teacher saying, ‘Yes, you played that very well.’ I had nobody hearing my stories. It wasn’t like I was doing it for some praise from a music teacher or for my parents or anything. It was just between me and the Creator. I have a real solid sense of creativity; the Creator and the whole creation being one continually evolving thing: nature, and everything in it, all of us.” Creating and nurturing and inventing gave her a sense of control and safety and stability, and it helped her heal herself in the moment, though as a child, she thought of it as having fun. Sainte-Marie had an innate understanding of how to keep her inner spirit safe, no matter what was going on, and she couched her creativity in this instinctive and self-protective generosity and warmth. Her childlike hope never gave out, and it helped her cultivate kindness in creativity.