The New True Story of Pocahontas

By Eddie Strumfels

[1] America has spent the last two decades celebrating its history. Starting in 1992 with the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s journey, we’ve used these milestones to revisit, retell, and reexamine seminal moments in our nation’s birth. For many historians and academics, America’s nostalgic mood was the perfect opportunity to address a history that has been overwhelmingly incomplete. The United States at the turn of the 21st century was finally forced to acknowledge an ugly past; decades of progress in the civil rights movement met unprecedented technological advances, and it became impossible to celebrate the start of our history without acknowledging it as the death of another. Movies were made to coincide with historic anniversaries, as many filmmakers felt inspired to assimilate the “tough” history of colonization into our American myths. Films such as 1492: Conquest of Paradise, Black Robe, or The New World enjoyed pats on the back for “confronting” violent European colonialism in these retellings, lauded as “honest, historically accurate” with “no evil intentions” (Black Robe), or as an “enlightened revision of the historical figure” (1492). Few directly confronted Terrence Malick’s decision to retell the Pocahontas story, regarding it as a myth in a “swamp of kitsch” (Stephen Hunter) that Malick used to “explore what it means to be an American” and provide “a fresh new definition of early America” (Lisa Schwarzbaum).

[2] But despite all the nasty Europeans doing nasty things on camera, nothing in these movies sincerely shifts the core narrative of their myths; “complicated” characters like John Smith or Christopher Columbus give the viewer a comfortable distance from which they can shake their heads at somebody else’s forefathers. We immediately associate ourselves, and our “true” history, with the Good White Men (to borrow Rob Kilker’s wonderful phrase) like Smith and Columbus, allowing us to condemn the near-genocide of the native Americans side-by-side with the white heroes we want to represent our past. No myth has been abandoned, merely morphed to incorporate voices increasingly difficult to ignore without touching the core narratives that justify colonialism; The New World is more like a live-action version of Disney’s Pocahontas than it is a “fresh new definition of early America.” If we’re truly eager to reexamine “what it means to be an American,” maybe we should finally listen to these other voices instead of paraphrasing them.

[3] The True Story of Pocahontas is one of the voices we should be listening to. Published in 2007, 400 years after the founding of Jamestown and less than two years after The New World was released, Custalow and Daniel’s book offers to the American public the Mattaponi oral history of Pocahontas for the first time. The history of their Pocahontas is provocative, to say the least -- she was kidnapped, raped, and then murdered -- but even if the apparent severity of their new narrative makes it too difficult to accept upon first reading, it’s hard to ignore how easily they dismantle our own Pocahontas myth. Why was a ten-year-old girl allowed to stop an execution or allowed to be there in the first place? Why would the Mattaponi, who never execute their prisoners, decide to start with John Smith? Why would their chief’s young daughter be allowed to travel through miles of wilderness to deliver food to the colonists, who had rightfully earned a reputation for violence? Why would Pocahontas abandon her father, her family, her friends, and her tribe? And why would she run to the Europeans of all people? These are questions we’ve never asked about Pocahontas before, but they seem more born out of common sense than an understanding of Mattaponi culture, tradition, and history that was previously unavailable.

[4] Why didn’t we see the holes in our story before, or, if we did, why didn’t we pay attention? Because we didn’t want to. Because by asking these questions, we acknowledge that perhaps Pocahontas didn’t immediately love us and that she isn’t the symbolic union of cultures and harbinger of peace we want her to be. This is the “fresh new definition of early America” we say we want, because it’s a history that wasn’t constructed to push the same narrative as ours was. Unlike every previous representation of Pocahontas, The True Story focuses on the most difficult questions of this country’s founding instead of deflecting attention away from them. These are scary questions, because they need scary answers.

[5] Our Pocahontases cannot co-exist; she stands for two very different things in our two histories, and they shouldn’t continue to exist at the same time. The Mattaponi reclaim sovereignty over their daughter’s story with this book, making it impossible to cling to our myth without perpetuating a history of oppression we say we want to leave behind. The True Story makes willful ignorance an inherent part of our Pocahontas myth. Like any title filed under “history” The True Story shouldn’t be considered an objective truth, and it doesn’t need to be -- it just needs to be heard. Which is exactly what didn’t happen. Five years have passed since The True Story was first published, and in all that time Pocahontas remained locked in Disney’s vault, virtually unscathed. The True Story has gone unnoticed by the public and dismissed by academia, and those few folks who did take the time to read and think about the book were far from forgiving. It’s an imperfect text, like any other, and though the writing’s conversational tone gives the impression of a light work, I don’t think that explains why The True Story has gone ignored.

[6] I remember two distinct things from the day we reviewed this book in class: how harshly the book was critiqued (more scrutinized than any other text we worked with, in my opinion) and being the only one in the room who never watched Disney’s Pocahontas. I don’t think my classmates would willfully ignore hard academic research in favor of a children’s movie, but I do think they (and others) are reluctant to lose their Pocahontas. She’s become an important figure in America, as a pop-culture icon and a foremother of our country, a woman we’ll always love because she was the first to love us. Confronted with the Mattaponi’s Pocahontas -- a prepubescent girl who was ripped from her home, forced to birth a child out of rape, sent to a foreign land, converted to a foreign religion, and then possibly murdered -- we recoil in terror, or avert our eyes, or else fight back. It’s natural, it’s understandable, and it has to end.

[7] We don’t want to lose our Pocahontas, but she should never have been thought of as “ours” in the first place. 400 years ago we stole a daughter from the Mattaponi, and 400 years later they are taking her back. It’s time we let her out of the vault, along with all the questions she’ll bring with her. Why did we ruin this woman’s life and then use her to justify our existence for 400 years? How can we justify destroying entire civilizations in order to build ours, and why is it so difficult to be honest about that part of our history? How come we never heard from the Mattaponi before now? Are all of our myths used to perpetuate oppression? Why did we let this lie become a part of our cultural identity, and why is that changing now? How do we talk about Pocahontas from now on? Or do we at all? Are we as destructive and violent now as we were then? What can we do to right the wrongs we committed against the Native Americans, if anything at all? What would we be unwilling to do? Why?

[8] Pocahontas, the mother we once loved for all the questions she never asked, now calls everything into question. Stripped of the story we had forced on her, her identity-in-flux is both an opportunity to start mending the mistakes of our fathers and ourselves and a reminder to question the history we’ve been given. How we pass the myth of Pocahontas to the coming generations could mark an honest turning point in American culture -- will we repeat the mistakes of those who came before us or embrace the questions they once avoided? And though I haven’t truly got a clue how it will turn out, I do have two small hopes. I hope our Pocahontas to come will be the “fresh new definition of early America” capable of redefining “what it means to be an American," and I hope we finally forget how to open Disney’s vault.