POCAHONTAS

If someone in your family experienced harm while admitted to a federal Indian hospital and passed away on or after January 25, 2016, you may be able to submit a claim as an ISDate representative or heir. Find out more at www.ihsettlement.ca or call 1-888-5929101. This is a CBC Podcast. In the movies, she is a convenient myth. In reality, she was flesh and blood. In the movies, she was a full grown woman. In reality, she was 11 or 12 and he was nearly three times her age. In the movies, they are in love. She protected him and he was her savior. In reality, she was stolen. In the movies, there was a happy ending. In reality, she died of disease thousands of kilometers from her home. Hey, I'm Ganyatio and today on telling our twisted histories, we are going just around the river bend and decolonizing the word "Pocahontas". In most indigenous communities, to learn something, you're told to watch and especially to listen. We've been told we're in a post-colonial period, but we know that the processes of colonialism are still at play and their consequences impact our communities every day. For a long time, we have been talked about, labeled, studied, categorized, but now it's time for us to do the talking. Please leave any stereotypes at the door and as you listen, keep this word in mind. "Mamu". In the Innu Amun language, "Mamu" means "together". To bring you this series, we travel to 15 indigenous communities from 11 different homelands whose traditional territories now host the provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick and Labrador. We spoke with 75 Inuit, Maytee and First Nations people to bring you their voices, directly. So together, we will decolonize our world and ourselves, one word at a time. Now listen up and let us tell you our stories as we explore and unravel our twisted histories. It can be hard to separate the myth of Pocahontas from the actual history. And today on telling our twisted histories, we honor the person behind the story. Her real name, in fact, was Matouaka. And she lived in what is now known as the State of Virginia in the early 1600s. If we want to decolonize the myth of Pocahontas, we have to ask who she really was and what parts of her story were changed or left out and why. Who benefits from the idea of Pocahontas, the Disney Princess and not the person herself? Here's Gonyon Gehaga educator and historian Michael Rice from the community of Gahnawage. Pocahontas was the daughter of a pal, then chief. And she had met and she had tried to be a culture intermediary between her people and the colonists down in Virginia. And what I know is that because she had helped the early colonists, they've alladied her almost to. She's pretty close to a saint in American history. Pocahontas was someone doing what most native women tried to do in those days because the women had the power and the village was trying to reconcile different points of view so people could get along. And unfortunately because she didn't write a dictionary or a diary like most people did in historical times, we don't have her point of view because for European men, whatever a woman thought her said, they never wrote down. I always see as pictures of her what they think she looked like or she said or. But we don't know what she actually said. But when you look at it, what she was doing was she was trying to exercise the women's traditional role of being the power brokers and being the leadership in the village, which is often missing from North American history, colonial history. We don't have a lot of the written records of what the women actually thought and said because the European writers, even though they heard them say something, would just say, "Oh, well, she. you'll write it one line. A woman spoke for 20 minutes, but it wasn't translated." Hmm, who's got the microphone now? An indigenous woman? We've come a long way since then. And as indigenous women, we are reclaiming our voices in our communities, in our societies, and in our histories. Now here are some of the indigenous people we talk to. Let's start off with Olivia Ike Duncan of the Inuit Community of Kuzhuak. It's so funny because my boyfriend had just played this movie the other night as we were lying in bed with Neva. I know we were just. Oh my God. Oh my God. I know that five doesn't really get it. It doesn't take offense or anything, you know. I don't know. I didn't realize either. I loved Pocahontas. But again, you learn the history and you have the understanding in the background and it's just so painful again. Dorine Petake, a teacomick in Manuon. Yes, I do. When I go to travel, I see a lady in a lady who doesn't understand Pocahontas. Joshua Coapit from the Greek community of Wapmangstui. Pocahontas? No, I never met her. For if a woman is a Pocahontas, it would be an insult. I don't really know the history of Pocahontas, but what I've read is not really a good image of a. Or just a type of a native one. Michael Reiss, Gonyon Kehaga from the community of Garnoage. Sadly, she's another Aboriginal woman that was taken and a whole story was made out of her most of it, which was not factual. Reiss Morrison, may tea from Winnipeg, living in Quebec City. Well, of course, when you hear the word Pocahontas, you always, in my growing up, we always thought of a beautiful Indian girl. But now, realizing and understanding the true story of Pocahontas, of course, we have to recognize that this is probably one of the first examples of murdered and missing women. So this woman was maybe taken against her will and shown off like a trophy. And she was a child bride and she was probably 14 years old and it just shows the savagery of the colonizers and the way that they actually treated women. For Indigenous women in particular, the word Pocahontas takes on a different meaning, especially when it's someone else calling you Pocahontas. I dare somebody to call me Pocahontas. Here are Jillian Delarond, Pepper O'Bomsoon, and Jody Dibow in the Gonyon Kehaga community of Garnoage. I think any Indigenous person and a woman, especially, would be offended if somebody was called you Pocahontas. You know that if anybody calls you Pocahontas, I'd take up those factors. Oh, yeah, definitely. You don't think to call them a little bit. That's just. Actually, you know, it's funny. No one would ever call me Pocahontas because I don't have that dark skin and I don't have those features. And I think people who do really get offended by that. Like, I would, you know, like if someone's like, "Oh yeah, she's like easy Pocahontas." No. And just like the myth of Pocahontas puts a cheery smile on a twisted history, so does the idea of imagining Indigenous women as modern-day Pocahontas is. Here's Pepper O'Bomsoon again. Disney took that story and over-sexualized this young woman that you have the image of her kind of with the off-shoulder and low-be-be-again going back to being an object. From its original story, objectifying and then over-sexualizing. And that's an issue that we know today is a huge issue with our women. It's why we have to have such a huge crisis that Mrs. Emerding did just women is the fact that our value system and the way that our women are just kind of created or recreated in the public eye. It's problematic and this is the spin-off of it, right? So it's just a representation of those two extremes. Which again just feeds those stereotypes of available sexual objectifiable. [Music] We couldn't do an episode about decolonizing the myth of Pocahontas without talking about Disney. The 1995 cartoon has cemented this image of the good Indian in our minds who wants peace and for us to care about the earth. But isn't angry about all that genocide and ecological destruction. Once again, here is Olivia Ike Duncan. It's so out when you understand that, understand the truth. I couldn't even believe that Disney still has the movie on Disney+. Like in 2021 with everything that's going on there, still playing this and it's not even kind of like fixed up, you know. They're making it all seem wonderful and fun. The tropes about indigenous people found in Pocahontas are found throughout Hollywood, from fern gully to dances with wolves, to even more modern films like The Revenant or James Cameron's Avatar. We see the same stereotypes played to again and again. Here is Lisa Dutcher of the Wallasticae Nation, living in Frederickton. It just plays into a lot of the white savior mentality. Pocahontas being rescued by John Smith or whoever it was, you know, the white man who swept her away from her people and now she's going to live a civilized life. I mean, this is. If that's the fairy tale we want to tell, whether it be Kevin Costner and dances with wolves or Pocahontas, it's always that white savior mentality that exists in a lot of these movies that I think really makes native people look less than, you know. And I think that's kind of always the underlying message that comes out in those stories is that we need to be saved from ourselves, you know. We need to be changed. So I just. yeah, I have no use for it. Hank Phillips, Ganyokahoga and Garnawage. Just Disney just taking culture and reappropriating it so they can make money off of a cheesy love story from the 90s. They're all on it for money. They hire people who do some research, but then they get to the big executives and the production people who are like, "Oh, we can't have that because it's not marketable for children or whatever." So they boil it down, and then you know, you have this whole entire image of what people think of natives and what went on back there, which from a cartoon. That also gives everybody an image of what they think we are. It's like, we're not running around with headdresses all the time, saying, "How? We're just. we're here, we've got. we're brown skinned, we've been around for thousands of years, and. I don't just treat this as respect, and don't boil us down to a cartoon, because we're not cartoons." Jacques Watson from the Abanaki community of Odinac. It reinforces stereotypes, but it's just one of many cases, like the Chicago Black Hawks. It's in sports logos, it's in films, it's stereotypes, it's all that. These images get spread around until they're everywhere, and now when people imagine an Indian, it's Pocahontas. One of the problems with the myth of Pocahontas is that it places indigenous people in a romanticized past. It's a way to not only rewrite history, but to imagine that we are no longer here. For Susie Obamsohn from the Abanaki community of Odinac, movies like Pocahontas are the source of a lot of the dated misconceptions about indigenous people. It's like this. They really froze us in a moment. There's no room to evolve. You know, we get asked, where's our clothes? And when we ask what clothes do you mean? And it really creates this image of how we are supposed to look. Like if you're indigenous, you're supposed to look like Pocahontas. Jody Diable. Goyneke Haga from the community of Gahnawaga. They don't want to see natives wearing suits, and because it puts you up equal to them. So the image for people that was palatable of Native American people, that's what they thought we were, and let's keep that like that. So people don't have to ask questions. Maybe I don't know. Mainstream society defines what things are when you don't have an idea of it, right? [Music] [Music] One of the most important steps in decolonizing anything is education. These popular stereotypes like Pocahontas can be entry points into conversations and opportunities to educate people about our true histories. We go to Frederickton now to hear from Ron Tromblay of the Wallasticae Nation as he tells us how he did exactly that teaching high school. I taught 11-3 Native Studies in Ormato High for around 10 years, and part of the curriculum that I personally developed because I didn't follow, again, I don't obey well. I didn't follow the curriculum that they gave me the follow. I said, "It says crap." So I created my own curriculum. So one of the modules that I created was about stereotypes, and part of that was I showed them about the portion of Pocahontas and read the truth about that she was stolen, and she was raped, and she was probably one of the first murdered and missing Indigenous women in our nations here. I had done a section on mascots, and it was just mascots, the Washington Redskins, Atlanta Braves, the Edmonton Eskimos and Florida Seminoles. So I had these depictions of cartoons and how negative they were. What if a team was called Washington Caucasians and she was a redneck guy, you know, illustrated and stuff. So they kind of felt a little uncomfortable about me talking about that, but I wanted to show them the truth. Sometimes the truth can be uncomfortable, but it's still the truth. Just like it can be uncomfortable to learn your favorite Indigenous Disney Princess has a story of real life tragedy. Uncovering uncomfortable truths is part of learning. It's part of untwisting our histories. It allows us to know better and hopefully do better as well. I'm Gagnetti O, thanks for listening as we decolonize the word Pocahontas. Join us next time on telling our twisted histories as we decolonize more words. Telling our twisted histories is a co-production of the CBC and Ter Inu. The series was written and directed by Ozzy Michelin, original concept by Carin L'Annoir Briein, based on telling our story, an original idea by Ian Boyd and Reginald Voulin, research by Isabel Picard, interviews by Carin L'Annoir Briein, Brad Groluy and Ozzy Michelin. Editing and sound design by Benoit Dam, our music is courtesy of Music Nomad. Our production supervisor is Anik Mani, producer Elodie Poulet, CBC program manager Sophie Claude Miller, CBC senior producer Carrie Haver, executive producer Fonsin Allaire. We give an extra special thank you to the 11 groups of first peoples whose homelands make up Quebec, New Brunswick and Labrador, for the generosity of their words and trust in us to share their stories. You can find more episodes of telling our twisted histories on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm your host Gagnetti O, Niawa, see you next time. [Music] For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/podcasts