TO BOLDLY GO WHERE IRON EYES CODY, WARD CHURCHILL, AND FAUXCAHONTAS HAVE GONE BEFORE: Buffy Sainte-Marie Stripped of Honorary Degree Over Native American Ancestry Dispute.

Buffy Sainte-Marie — the Oscar-winning folk singer who claims to be an Indigenous woman of Cree descent — was recently stripped of an honorary degree over an ancestry dispute.

On Wednesday, May 13, the University of Toronto announced that it had rescinded Sainte-Marie’s honorary Doctor of Laws degree. She received the honor in 2019 for her “excellence in the arts, as a singer-songwriter, actress and visual artist.”

The decision, approved on May 13, came more than two years after the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) aired a documentary from The Fifth Estate alleging that Sainte-Marie lied about her Native American ancestry. In it, a birth certificate indicated that she was born in Massachusetts to Italian-American parents. Family members also confirmed this.

Flashback to a much more enlightened and tolerant 2023: Rachel Dolezal ahead of her time? The “Pretendian” wave in Academia. “Even eight years ago, I point out, Dolezal justified her posturing as a black woman — who wound up running a local NAACP chapter in Washington — because, as she told Matt Lauer, she ‘identifies as black.’ Was she just ahead of her time? If biology has nothing to do with sexual identity, can anyone argue that it has a role in ethnic identity? And if so, what does that do to the entire edifice of affirmative action in both admissions and faculty hiring, especially in Academia?”

Or as a wise Assistant to the Traveling Secretary of the New York Yankees once said: