The University of Toronto has decided to rescind the honorary degree awarded to singer Buffy Sainte-Marie seven years ago, following the ongoing controversy over her Indigenous heritage.
The university says it received a petition last year to revoke the honorary Doctor of Laws degree that was bestowed upon her in 2019, and that the Standing Committee on Recognition unanimously recommended it be rescinded. The school’s Governing Council approved the rescindment on May 13.
The move comes in the wake of a 2023 CBC news report, which questioned Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous heritage.
The “Fifth Estate” investigative piece found a birth certificate that indicated she was born in 1941 in Massachusetts. The report cited U.S. family members who said she was not adopted and doesn’t have Indigenous ancestry.
The university is the latest institution to revoke an honour given to the musician in the absence of proof that she was born in Canada.
In 2025, Sainte-Marie returned her Order of Canada medals “with a good heart,” saying at the time that she’s an American citizen and holds a U.S. passport. She responded to questions around her birth and claim to Indigeneity by stating: “My Cree family adopted me forever, and this will never change.”
Sainte-Marie has repeatedly described herself as First Nations from Canada, but was adopted as a young child and raised in Massachusetts by Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie. She has said Winifred identified as part Mi’kmaq.
Her 2018 authorized biography says there’s no official record of her birth. It says she was probably born Cree on Piapot First Nation in the Qu’Appelle Valley in Saskatchewan in the early 1940s. Named Beverley, she was nicknamed Buffy in high school.
Sainte-Marie rose to fame as a folk performer in Toronto’s Yorkville music scene, penning the war protest anthem “Universal Soldier” and later winning an Oscar as one of the songwriters on “Up Where We Belong,” the ballad from the 1982 film “An Officer and a Gentleman.”
Files from The Canadian Press were used in this report
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