'Buffy plagiarized: sadness for the culture - max. 120 characters'

"Reflection provides us with a lens through which we can see how this hoax was orchestrated like a fairy tale Disney production," says a regional elder.

The effects continue to spread through my body, my mind and my soul this day. I feel shaken in every possible way after learning how we have suddenly lost one of the most important symbols Native people have ever known in our modern era.

The person I thought was Buffy St. Marie is suddenly gone! The Native woman we all knew as Buffy, who we watched on TV, who we paid to see in concert, suddenly, tragically, dematerialized. Santa Maria!

This''hit me like a punch in the gut, and as I watched Channel Five, the investigative magazine on the CBC, it hit me again, one punch in the gut after another, as astounding evidence was presented that the person I knew as Buffy St. Mary was a misrepresentation not only of herself, but a misrepresentation of me as a native.

Not Aunt Buffy, I thought. I tried to make sense of it all. Immediately there was a sense of loss, abandonment, betrayal, and above all, I felt that the spirits had come to change the axis of the Earth. I tried desperately to put the pieces together, but they scattered like a falsity of beads and bling. I wondered if I could ever trust again.

CBC's Channel Five has gathered evidence that'. 'year on the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan. But the real story seems to be different. Buffy (Beverly) St. Marie was adopted as an adult, after she had already created the image of Buffy (and was famous), by a family from the Piapot tribe as part of a traditional Cree adoption ceremony. But she was never born there, and she was definitely never dragged from there, as she claimed. The statement is an insult to indigenous people who were taken from their birthplaces and cut open like a rusty surgical instrument, reopening old wounds.

Irony is woven throughout this farcical storyline. Much of the history invented by Buffy's image manifests as a subterfuge in our indigenous cultural histories. The subterfuge is''A villain who can often take on a persona and make someone believe they are something they are not. And this fictional person has made us believe that she is one of us. This image was created to reflect us, using every stereotype possible, making it impossible to determine where she was born. But subterfuge stories are meant to teach us something.

Buffy deceived us. "But she did so much for us!" - some will say. That may be true, but such kindness is reminiscent of tactics used by organized crime and physical and sexual abusers to gain a firm''position in your homes and communities around the world. The scheme is simple: make them believe that you are doing them good, so that if your plan ever comes to light, even they will stand up in your defense. She had power over us, and in many cases she still does. And even I defended her in the beginning. I defended the Buffy I thought was real. The Buffy I had personally encountered many times during my career as a traveling musician. The Buffy that one of my sons deeply admired. A warm, friendly, always chipper Buffy who made you feel special every time you met her. So it's a punch in the gut to know that we were deceived.

The actual reflection provides us with a lens through which we can see how this deception was orchestrated, as if'Disney's 'fairy tale production. This hurts those who are already suffering the effects of colonialism and the loss of culture, language, land. Now we are losing the man who gave us hope that we could somehow overcome all this loss. But that person was never real. This man was a false construct, like reservations and the Indian Act. This man is an identity thief born of colonizers who took away our hope and dignity.

So, once again, we mourn. We laugh, we cry, we comfort each other, and we move forward. So when I hear non-native voices defending this fake Buffy St. Mary's construction, telling me it's not so bad, it helped you in so many ways, I see how colonization happened. And I can't help but feel''The anxiety the Taino-Indians must have felt upon learning that the man (Christopher Columbus) who had feasted with them, prayed with them, befriended them, was now going to set his dogs on them.

There are other Buffy's. And if we let her go, be lenient with her, we'll give permission for more. "