TMU mural featuring Buffy Sainte-Marie 'to be updated before the end of this year'
A prominent mural featuring Buffy Sainte-Marie at Toronto Metropolitan University is being removed, the university says amid an online discussion against the disgraced singer-songwriter.
The mural features a host of celebrated Canadian names, including Buffy Sainte-Marie. “TMU needs to update their Greatest Canadian tribute on Gould St,” read a post on Reddit Tuesday.
TMU needs to update their Greatest Canadian tribute on Gould St.
by u/mkbt in toronto
Sainte-Marie’s successful music career and activism made her an icon for Indigenous Canadians, but CBC reported she is an American without Indigenous lineage.
The singer-songwriter was stripped of her Order of Canada in January this year by an Ordinance signed by the Governor General. Although no reason was stated in the notice , Sainte-Marie was in the spotlight following a 2023 CBC News investigation that questioned her claims about her Indigenous identity. Sainte-Marie refuted questions about her Cree heritage but eventually her website removed references to her being born on Piapot First Nation, located outside of Regina.
In a response to National Post’s inquiry, TMU responded in an email saying the university is in the process of updating the images on the west facade of The Image Centre.
“The current mural was installed in 2017 and was originally intended to have a five-year lifespan,” a university spokesperson said in an email. “A refresh had been planned, but pandemic-related delays shifted the timeline. It is currently scheduled to be updated before the end of this year.”
Participating in the online discourse, the user who shared the post and the photos of the mural wrote in the comments, “Buffy was featured prominently in the Human Rights museum in Winnipeg. They eventually yanked her presence because her fraud was too glaring to ignore. Celebrating her this way — so centrally on campus — doesn’t send the best message to the young undergrads and highschoolers at TMU.”
The action taken by the museum in Winnipeg happened late February this year, with one professor saying he was surprised it took so long to remove her profile from the exhibit.
“She lied on a continuous basis,” Robert-Falcon Ouellette, a Winnipeg-based professor at the University of Ottawa and a former member of Parliament, told CBC in February . “Not just a little bit, not a misunderstanding, but she purposely created a fog around her identity.”
As for who else could possibly feature in the updated mural, the name of the Canadian comedian Mike Myers came up in the comments section of the Reddit post.
The comedian has a host of new fans following his battle-cry of elbows up, a famous hockey phrase that he revived following Trump’s 51st state rhetoric during a skit for Saturday Night Live in March this year.
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