Menzies: The Buffy Sainte-Marie story spurs self-questioning for me

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The painful fallout from the CBC’s investigation of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s determine, re-broadcast final weekend, has challenged me to mirror on potential colonial biases in my seemingly impartial “skilled” practices as a author. I ponder if there’s an identical soul-searching occurring on the CBC, given the anguish and division this system has generated within the Indigenous cultural group.

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I ponder if the individuals at CBC questioned framing the story as a Fifth Property “investigation” of this 82-year-old non-Canadian Canadian icon within the first place. It appears professionally impartial — but it set a binary oppositional tone: harmless or responsible, full cease. There’s additionally what qualifies as related supply materials. Within the practices I discovered as a journalist, goal information akin to beginning certificates have been the gold normal, stripped of context and extenuating circumstances.

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Framing this system as a dialog may need higher allowed the messy contradictions of lived lives and self-identification to simply compassionately be. There may need been house to segue into the cultural context of the Nineteen Fifties when Buffy Sainte-Marie was an adolescent; at the moment, Hollywood was nonetheless spray-painting white actors to suit what it thought an Indian ought to appear like.

A conversational circle may additionally have been extra conducive to exploring the complexities of identification, together with the tales we inform ourselves and reside into, and the complicity of others when this suits what they need to hear as effectively. It may need thought of completely different approaches to identification with out rating them: the function of blood quantum in establishing identification for the colonial administration of Indigenous affairs and the long-standing function of adoption in Indigenous kinship identities.

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Within the catch-up studying I’ve been doing lately, I now perceive how integral adoption was in extending kinship relations amongst Indigenous nations sharing looking and trapping territory, particularly because the European-centred fur commerce expanded throughout central and western Canada within the seventeenth and 18th centuries, when this follow often included individuals from France.

Framing this system this manner may not have garnered the million-plus views it has within the impeccably skilled investigative format that was used. Nevertheless it may not have brought about a lot ache and division in Indigenous communities.

Simply over per week in the past, a CBC Radio producer with this system “Unreserved,” Laura Beaulne-Stuebing, posted a follow-up to Geoff Leo’s Fifth Property documentary, giving voice to 3 Indigenous ladies within the cultural sector calling for therapeutic. One was Lori Campbell, nêhiyawak/Métis from the Montreal Lake Cree Nation and affiliate vice-president of Indigenous engagement on the College of Regina, who mentioned: “The one factor I need to hear from white individuals proper now could be ‘ … I hope you’re doing okay. I’m pondering of you.’ ”

As a white one that’s spent my total profession within the cultural sector, I’m pondering of you, and feeling for you too. I’ll proceed my soul-searching.

Heather Menzies’ newest guide, her twelfth, is Assembly My Treaty Kin: A Journey Towards Reconciliation. Menzies is an adjunct professor at Carleton College and a member of the Order of Canada.

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