Buffy Sainte Marie net worth: Fortune explored amid indigenous ancestry controversy 

Buffy Sainte Marie is a Native American singer-songwriter known for her folk songs, including the Oscar-winning song Up Where We Belong. With a net worth of around $3 million, most of it derived from her singing career, the singer is considered one of the world's most iconic indigenous singer-songwriters.

However, the singer has been recently mired in a controversy after a CBC report published on October 27, 2023, claimed to contradict the singer's heritage and life history, stating,

"That (birth certificate) record said Beverly Jean Santamaria, who started going by the name Buffy Sainte-Marie early in her music career, was born in 1941 in Stoneham, Mass., north of Boston, to Albert and Winifred Santamaria — the couple Sainte-Marie claimed adopted her. Mother, father and baby were all listed as white."

Buffy Sainte Marie has since then contradicted the CBC report, stating in a statement on her official Facebook page,

"First, the central proof used to question my identity is a story fabricated by my abuser and repeated by two members of my estranged family I don’t even know. This has been incredibly re-traumatizing for me and unfair to all involved."

The singer continued,

"The second is my birth certificate. As many Indigenous people know, and the National Sixties Scoop Healing Foundation of Canada has stated, it was common for birth certificates of Indian children to be created by western governments after they were adopted or taken away from their families."

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More on Buffy Sainte Marie's net worth and heritage

Buffy Sainte Marie primarily derives her wealth from her long music career. Starting in the early 1960s, the singer began her career as a touring musician before achieving her first chart success with her album, Little Wheel Spin and Spin, which peaked at number 97 on the Billboard 200 album chart.

This was followed by her subsequent major album success in 1971, with her album She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina, peaking at number 47 on the Australian album chart, one of her most successful albums.

In the early 1980s, the singer became one of the first to use newly arrived computers, such as the Apple II to record her music. At the same time, she collaborated with Will Jennings and musician Jack Nitzsche to write the hit track, Up Where We Belong. The track, featured in An Officer and a Gentleman, won the Best Original Song award at the 1983 Academy Awards.

Since then, Buffy Sainte Marie has won several awards, notably the Juno Award and Polaris Music Prize in recent years, the former for her medicine song collections. The singer also continued to perform live, although she recently retired from touring. All of these factors combined make up the majority of her revenue.

Buffy Sainte Marie has close ties with several First Nation tribes. Still, a common heritage is difficult to trace due to the impact of colonial policies from the early 1900s wherein children of indigenous people were forcibly taken away from their tribes and resettled into White families or orphanages.

This is a practice that Sainte Marie mentions in her autobiography, co-authored by CBC and its producer Andrea Warner, Buffy Sainte-Marie: An Authorized Biography, in which she states,

"I was told that I was adopted. I was told that I was just born ‘on the wrong side of the blanket... I was told that we were part-Indian, but nobody knew anything about it. So many of us were either taken away to residential schools, or some other school, or we were adopted out or we got lost in the system, or we were otherwise bleached."

However, the CBC report quotes the singer's niece, Heidi St. Marie, stating,

"Nobody except for Buffy ever talked about Buffy being adopted. We were told flat out that she was my Uncle Albert’s child."

The CBC also adds that the family believes that the singer adopted the pretense of a native heritage as a form of publicity stunt to further her music career and gain fame and prestige.

Whether or not the claims are valid, Buffy Sainte Marie has been involved in the indigenous communities for a long time and was adopted by the Piapot First Nation in the early 1960s.