When Cambridge film producer Stephen Paniccia, who worked on the documentary Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry it On, was reached for comment on the recent allegations questioning the singer's Indigenous heritage, he was quick and to the point.
"I have no comment," Paniccia said by phone this week.
But White Pine Pictures, the company that Paniccia works for as the director of finance and production, jumped to the famed cultural icon's defence in a prepared statement.
"We stand behind Buffy and believe it to be true that her mother told her she was adopted and of Canadian Indigenous descent," it read.
The allegations in question stem from a recent CBC Fifth Estate piece that dove into Sainte-Marie's upbringing and discovered a birth certificate from Stoneham, Mass and family accounts which contradict her claims of being born on the Piapot Reserve near Craven, Saskatchewan to Cree parents.
Paniccia worked closely with Sainte-Marie and visited her home in Hawaii during the pandemic as part of the production. He spoke highly of the interactions at the time and referred to her as "down to earth."
White Pine Productions weren't the only ones to stand up in support as the film's director, Madison Thomas, expressed her disappointment. Having worked directly with Sainte-Marie, Thomas said in a statement she was able to hear first hand accounts of the impact she had on the Indigenous community.
"I got to know Buffy on a personal level, and was a front row witness to endless statements regarding Buffy’s commitment to the global Indigenous community over her 60 year career," Thomas said.
"I also met the amazing Piapot and Obey families during the course of filming, I know that they fully claim Buffy as part of their family and community and have ever since Buffy met them as a young woman."
A third company that worked on the film, Eagle Vision, which was founded by Lisa Meeches who is Anishinaabe from Long Plain First Nation, said the Indigenous community has become used to being singled out in these types of claims.
Despite the negative publicity she's received, Meeches believes Sainte-Marie will turn it into a positive in the end.
"This is nothing new, Indigenous people are used to this, used to being stripped of their identities, used to their true history being rewritten, and used to having everything taken from them," Eagle Vision's statement read.
"Indigenous children have been taken from their families since first contact and their identities have continued to be taken from them every single day. Buffy will likely use this as a message and a teaching moment as she has always done."
After the film's release, Paniccia said he was thrilled to have had the opportunity to work with someone like Sainte-Marie.
“To hear the audiences and to listen to them discuss all the things they didn’t know about Buffy and what they learned was great,” he said last fall after returning from the Toronto International Film Festival where the documentary premiered.
“I feel really lucky to be able to tell her story.”
