DULUTH — Music fans around the world are grappling with

a recent report by CBC News,

which uncovered a birth certificate indicating that folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie was biologically born to white parents in Massachusetts and not, as she has long claimed, adopted by that couple from birth parents of the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan.

The revelation comes amid a reckoning with the practice of Indigenous identity fraud, in which people falsely claim to have Native ancestry. While Sainte-Marie forged close ties with a Piapot family, the doubt over whether her journey to Saskatchewan literally constituted a homecoming has caused sorrow and anger among generations who have embraced Sainte-Marie as an icon of Indigenous music and culture.

Reading this news in Duluth, I couldn’t help but think of Sainte-Marie’s peer, Bob Dylan. I’m not the only one — in the CBC News article, Dylan’s is the first name mentioned among fellow members of Sainte-Marie’s 1960s musical circles.

Dylan and Sainte-Marie both rose to prominence during what became known as the “folk revival” in American music. Both were born in 1941, and both took stage names: Dylan was originally named Robert Zimmerman, while Sainte-Marie was born Beverly Jean Santamaria.

Both left the areas where they grew up — Minnesota’s Northland for Dylan, the Boston suburbs for Sainte-Marie — and joined burgeoning urban coffeehouse scenes. Dylan made his way to New York via Minneapolis, while Sainte-Marie cut her musical teeth in Toronto and elsewhere.

Their paths converged in Greenwich Village. By Sainte-Marie’s account, Dylan heard her perform and urged her to see the manager at the legendary Gaslight coffeehouse. “I owe him a debt of gratitude,” Sainte-Marie told

Rhythms

magazine in 2020. Robert Shelton, the New York Times critic who wrote Dylan’s breakout review, did the same for Sainte-Marie.

“The folk-music revival is continuing to splash color on the canvas of show business,” Shelton wrote in 1963. “Brightening the local entertainment scene (is) a local Algonquin Indian girl who has written more than 200 songs.”

Early in Dylan’s career, he took considerable creative license in discussing his origins. Journalists eventually discerned that Dylan grew up in northern Minnesota, but when the artist first started getting press, he would answer questions about his origins obliquely and would often add wild untruths.

He’d describe living on the Great Plains and in the desert Southwest as a child, then traveling with a carnival in his teen years. Dylan acknowledged being born in Duluth, but cast a bit of doubt even between the Twin Ports. “Maybe it was Superior, Wisconsin, right across the line,” he said to Shelton.

Dylan was casting himself in the mold of his

itinerant Okie hero Woody Guthrie.

Dylan’s dissembling was in the spirit of a long history of artists obscuring their origins so as upend expectations surrounding their work. It also, though, spoke to the highly contested notion of authenticity during the folk revival.

In that politically turbulent era, young people saw folk music as a way to amplify grassroots voices — including the voices of people of color who were fighting for civil rights. Dylan spent time not only in New York but in Harvard Square, where a more academic coffeehouse scene was embracing folk music as a way to tell a truer, more inclusive story about the origins of American popular music.

There was tension, though, in the fact that even in calls for racial justice, lighter-skinned artists’ voices were often elevated. This phenomenon was vividly on display in the national coverage of musical performances at the 1963 March on Washington. Odetta, a Black artist whose music had

directly inspired

the young Dylan, was seldom seen on television. By contrast, Dylan and Joan Baez, as well as Peter, Paul and Mary, were all over the news.

Baez, who met Dylan in Cambridge and became a key advocate for his work, was a defining celebrity of the folk revival. She had a voice of extraordinary power, performing with a riveting gravity and sincerity. In person, she had a razor-sharp wit and the kind of physical beauty that turned heads wherever she went.

Joan’s father was born in Mexico; her mother, in Scotland. The family traveled widely, and Baez came to music with an ironclad commitment to social justice. Her advocacy was lasting and impactful, yet Odetta eventually initiated a frank conversation with Baez over the fact that the star’s light skin opened doors that Black folksingers found closed. Those doors were opened all the wider for white men like Dylan.

This was the context into which Sainte-Marie emerged, hailed as an underrepresented voice. While the injustices Sainte-Marie highlighted in songs like “My Country ‘Tis of Thy People You’re Dying” are real, it matters if the singer claimed a narrative that was not, in fact, her own.

While Dylan has never publicly claimed Indigenous ancestry, it seems he was not entirely averse to wrapping ersatz Native identity into the web of stories he wove in his early years. The young Dylan told some of his New York friends that he was of Sioux descent, fellow musician Dave Van Ronk recalled.

“One night he spent something like an hour showing a bunch of us how to talk in Indian sign language, which I’m pretty sure he was making up as he went along, but he did it marvelously,” wrote Van Ronk in his memoir. “And when we found out that a lot of his stories were bull—t, that didn’t really lower his stock all that much.”

There was more than a whiff of appropriation to the entire folk revival, in which white musicians like Dylan often performed songs that emerged from the experiences of Black Americans and other communities of color. Still, Dylan

won respect

from many Black Americans for crediting his influences and repeatedly confronting the nation’s racial injustices.

The reality of Dylan’s own origins is that he was born to middle-class parents in Duluth and came of age in Hibbing. While

Dylan,

Bruce Springsteen

and others have movingly sung of the plight of the largely white working-class Minnesota miners exploited by industrial titans, popular musicians have had much less to say about the Indigenous history of regions like the Iron Range.

“The land from which the mines were carved was coercively taken from the Ojibwe, largely for its mineral resources,” wrote scholar Joseph Whitson in a 2019

article

about the erasure of Indigenous history on the Iron Range. “The white ethnic immigrant workers’ ‘sylvan wilderness’ was only created by the coercive, and often violent, removal of the Ojibwe to reservations.”

Sainte-Marie did sing, however disingenuously, of real abuses such as these. It seems the breathtaking irony of her career is that even in elevating the most prominent voice speaking on Indigenous issues during the folk revival, mainstream U.S. and Canadian media may still have been neglecting the voices of Native artists who were definitely not, as Dave Van Ronk might put it, making stuff up.