"Unpack That Nuance", please!
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The BBC told us in mid-November that renowned folk singer, Buffy Sainte-Marie, might not be what she has long claimed to be: an indigenous person born in 1941 into the Piapot First Nation reserve in Saskatchewan, Canada.
A CBC documentary counters otherwise, namely, with a birth certificate that shows that she was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts, USA as Beverly Jean Santamaria to "white" Italian parents.
(Interestingly, at least to me, Ms. Sainte-Marie, minus the feathers and beads, looks a lot like a cute girl with whom I went to high school near Boston MA; her last name was Pasquale.)
Tip-toing around the charge of being a rank imposter, the BBC, suggests she might be a "pretendian". What's that?
Michelle Cyca, a "freelance indigenous journalist from the Muskeg Lake First Nation" states, "We should respect the Piapot Nation and their laws ... but it doesn't cancel out everything she has said when she was building her career," ... "It is important that we are able to unpack that nuance."
I am reminded of people in my career who made much of their ability to deal with nuance; indeed it (having nuance "creds") was a positive for academic employment vs. someone who said outright what they believed.
The nuanced argument can give wafflers an unfair advantage over someone who says in plain English "this is what I see".
For me, perhaps facetiously, someone professing to being nuanced was as big a red flag as a work colleague wearing a bow-tie.
(For background, it is claimed by the fashionable that one can never trust a bow-tie wearer. And while little evidence is presented, my experience with bow-tied architects, lawyers, and consultants suggests there may be something to this yarn.)
In my business, the un-nuanced are deemed less capable than the person who straddles the fence, such as what we see with Ms. Sainte-Marie's defenders.
Cyca elaborates: "Being indigenous is not just a biological detail," ... "It is a political affiliation, it is a matter of citizenship."
Right.
Now if this charge were leveled at Elvis Presley, that he actually was born as Henry Schwarz in Reading, Pennsylvania (north of the Mason-Dixon line) and not in Tupelo, Mississippi, I might be in denial instead of going on about nuanced excuses.
Tangentially, does (did?) Ms. Sainte-Marie experience the so-called Imposture Syndrome?
While not directly related to someone faking who they are, many leaders - it is said - do sometimes question their success and have doubts that their achievements are more due to good luck than to inherent characteristics and hard work.
I certainly did at times.
I had such good fortune early on, it all seemed easy; that promotion and recognition came my way smoothly.
But, while I had my doubts, I also knew down deep that I worked hard and put in many hours in research, reading, writing, teaching, and on the job as an administrator.
No doubt, Sainte-Marie - "I know who I am" - will keep on keepin' on. Her fans are legion, we are told, and if they are woke enough they will not fail to "unpack that nuance."
As Bard algorithm-makers would have us believe: "Buffy Sainte-Marie's identity and ancestry is complex and still evolving. While the birth certificate (for Beverly Jean Santamaria) discovery sheds new light on her biological origins, it doesn't diminish her contributions to Indigenous culture and social activism."
The Bard-istas just can't bring themselves to say, "cultural appropriation".
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Copyright John Lubans all text 2023