The Girl Called Pocahontas

This podcast is a co-production of ABC-Australia and CBC Podcasts. For most of us, this story began as a fairy tale. As, you know, a Disney film and this princess. The daughter of the mighty chief Paul Hatton. The fact that there's this daughter of a chief. She was the friend of the earliest struggling English colonists. Pocahontas, the Indian princess, who falls in love with a settler. This swathed lots of blonde hair and, like, fit guy. Whom she nobly rescued protected and helped. cutesy girl who fell in love with this cutesy man. People think it's an easy story. It's a beautiful love story. You can sell lunch boxes like that. You can sell merch like that. Except there's just one problem with that fairy tale. Her real life is kind of hard to sell. What a load of hooy. I don't think the facts really point to that at all. It points to politics. It was no fairy tale. To money. She was a real person. And to a very controlling relationship. She wasn't just a story. For years, we've called her Pocahontas. The most famous iconic indigenous woman in history. She lives on in movies and merch and the imagination of generations of kids. Every single child during that generation probably has seen that movie like hundreds of millions. But her actual body lies under English soil. In a grave in a British port. So how did this happen? It's actually a double theft. It's theft of her and it's theft of the story. There's a bigger picture message here. This isn't the past for us. This isn't something that we can just wrap up in a box and kind of put away and bring out what we want to. And it's taken this long. It's taken this long to tell her story correctly. I mean, that's mind-blowing. In the days of the British Empire, things were taken. Artifacts, treasures and people. My name is Mark Finnell. And there is a polite version of history written in museum plaques, history books and Disney films. And then there's the stuff the British stole. So I am in Nashville, Tennessee, where it is just now morning time. The beautiful sun is just shining through and you're somewhere where it's midnight, right? Yeah, like literally I'm looking at guy. Yeah, no, it's middle of the night now. Yeah, oh my gosh, that's great. It's the fun of making international content. I know. You're always talking to somebody in the middle of the night. It's so true. It's so true. So yeah, I'm in Nashville, Tennessee. I've lived in the States my whole life, but my reservations in Canada. So a lot of my family is still up in Canada. This is Scrain Rider Lauren Delirey. And her collaborator is Derek. My name is Derek Blay. I grew up all across Canada and moved around as a kid. You know, on my dad's side of the family, British, Irish. On the other side of the family, I'm like Indigenous Canadian. Derek and Lauren, believe it or not, have been connected for decades before they were even born. They were connected by a Canadian government policy of taking Indigenous children from their homes and putting them into residential schools. My grandmother, who I never met, was forced to attend residential school. Our grandparents went to the same residential school. Our grandparents' names were on this plaque and there were literally five names from each other. So it was like, oh my god, our grandparents went to residential school together at the same school. Yeah, which is pretty wild. And here we are. And we had this very spiritual moment when we both realized this. I definitely think that there was some magical ancestral work that was happening for sure to bring us together. It was Lauren that was like, I hope that we've done our ancestors proud. The reason Derek and Lauren came together was to correct what they and many other people feel. Like it's been something of an injustice, one that's fested for decades. I feel like Pocahontas has always been in a way skeleton in my closet. Pocahontas was pretty much the only thing people knew about Indigenous people growing up where I grew up. In 1995, Walt Disney released a long gestating animated project, the story of a native woman, the daughter of a chief. They called it Pocahontas. This statuesque, poised and proud figure, who would actually come to be lauded as one of the very first non-white Disney princesses. In the story, she faces an aggressive invasion by the English setting up what was the very first permanent settlement in what is now the US state of Virginia. She falls in love with the swashbuckling captain John Smith who looks kind of like a candle with the voice of Mel Gibson. And spoiler alert, she becomes the bridge between the settlers and the First Nations people. If you're the right age and I was, this movie was massive. And yeah, I saw Pocahontas, I think like everybody else back in the late 90s, and you're like, "Oh, this is great." I remember being referred to as Pocahontas really, really, really young. I remember people relating Pocahontas to me as a native woman, as a native child, then at the time. I remember, I liked that. I liked that. I felt special. It was something that I had that moment in time being like, "Oh, there was a Disney princess that I could relate to." That felt good, so as I watched the movie and learned more about Pocahontas and learned more about my heritage. I learned that on one hand it was an honor, but on the other people really had it pretty twisted and didn't really have the real version of Pocahontas. Pocahontas is probably the most problematic stereotype that there is of indigenous people. Why the most? What is it that separates it from the others? Most of the movie is completely, historically, inaccurate, and the way that she's portrayed, the way that she's drawn, the way that she's hyper-sexualized, the way that she falls in love with John Smith is basically just like horrific. I learned pretty early on, being indigenous, a lot of the truth about Pocahontas. I also was given that kind of fire and passion to, especially at that age, but I think it's always stuck with me to correct people and to educate people. If they're going to talk about Pocahontas and then they're going to call me Pocahontas, I'm like, "Okay, we'll listen up." Here's the truth about Pocahontas. If you think this is also happy, let me tell you. Let me tell you her story and correct the narrative. And that is exactly what Lauren and Derek decided to do, literally. So I rewrote the script for Pocahontas, for a movie Pocahontas. It's basically an audio track that we created from scratch where we had to rewrite the entire story. When you press play on the audio and you press play on the movie, it syncs up. To sync the audio, press play at the beginning of the film when you hear the beep. Three, two, one. We hired indigenous artists and creators to do the voices. I rewrote everything and wrote it correctly. When everything you have is taken from you, even your own story, all you want is the right to voice your truth. And had to be rewritten so that the voices matched up with the lips moving. Let's be honest here, Disney movies, they're not known for their rigorous adherence to historic fact. But even so, when you start going through the list of stuff that they needed to change for Pocahontas, it's long. First of all, her name is Matauka. She was born with that name. Pocahontas, by most written accounts, was something of a nickname. The name Aminute has also been used by Matauka, is what gave Derek and Lauren's project its name. She was only 10 when the European invaders made their way to her homeland. She was literally a little girl. She wasn't just like, over-sexualized, supermodel. She was not a 16, 17, 18-year-old sex-kitten in the woods. Her falling in love with John Smith. This was the swashbuckling, principled English sailor, played by the not-canceled at the time, Mel Gibson. And yes, John Smith was a real person, and he definitely had interactions with this girl's people. But... He was no hero, so he definitely wasn't this suave, lots of blonde hair, and fit guy. He was sick, and a criminal, and nobody liked him. Literally nobody liked him. Uh, yeah. Look, the recorded history on John Smith is quite the read. I mean, on the way to Jamestown, even, he was charged with mutiny. We also know that he was involved in some beheadings earlier in his life. And in the years later, he would write his own legacy, which, I should say, centuries of his story ends up argued whether he embellished or if they're even close to accurate. But he's a thing. John Smith gets a say in his story. When it comes to the girl that we've been calling Pocahontas, she doesn't. She has no voice in history. We basically have these two threads to work with, what the English wrote down. And then on the other hand, the oral history passed down by her people. So is it possible to find truth in those threads? We do know that she was kidnapped. Kidnapped around 16 years old. Do you know, it doesn't actually matter which version of history you look at. One thing is consistent is that her story does not follow a nice neat arc. I mean, Smith's version paints a picture of her as this emissary between the colonists and her people. Tradition holds that she was married to a man named Cocoa and had a daughter. He eventually was killed. But at this exact moment, the relationship between the English and Matoca's people had deteriorated. The English needed food and the paramount shape Matoca's father refused to give it to them. So yes, a plan was hatched to kidnapper and used as an negotiating ship. The way the story is told at least, she was lured with the aid of another tribe nearby. And for their efforts? It was written down that she was traded for a pot, a copper pot. A moral retelling of what happened to that girl with the English. Is horrific. We do know that she was sexually assaulted. Gangraped and then getting pregnant. The girl later confided all of this to her older sister. And she eventually gave birth to a son, Thomas. And then being forced to marry one of her captors as a condition of her release. By now, she's just a late teenager. To back her farmer and merchant, John Rolf. Eventually, she nicely put converted to Christianity. And it's like, really? And so it was not this romantic fairy tale that we have been led to believe. And just like that, the girl the world knows is Pocahontas. Matoca, Ammonut, acquired a new name. Rebecca Rolf. I mean, I think she really was doing what she thought she had to do to survive. And then she was taken away to England. But why? Why take this girl all the way to England? And more importantly, why is it she never returned? Good day and welcome to Grey's End. For a story that is as dark and brutal as Matoca's has been, it's a little jarring to encounter somebody with the literal opposite kind of personality here in the UK. Okay, what? We're in the church yard of St. George's Church in Grey's End in Kent, which is the south-eastern part of the UK. And my name is Christoph Bull. I'm a local historian. And well, a bit of a history anorak, really. History anorak. How did you become a history anorak? How does that happen? I think I was born like it. Born like it. You came out of the womb just like quoting names and dates and stories about a local area. Well, not quite, but that sort of thing has always tickled my funny bone as it were. So there we are. Christoph Bull is a an absolute vibe and be. He's lived in this riverside town of Grey's End, his whole life. And this is a place that has a very unusual connection to that girl who left Virginia. And we're in the church yard here. It's got some pathways. We've got some seats. It's quite nice, actually, especially in the summer. It's got some very mature trees. So it's nice and shady. It's a little oasis of quiet in the busy town centre of Grey's End. And it's really spitting distance from the River Thames, which of course is how the Pocahontas story all came about and why all fits together, and why you're interviewing me all the way from Australia. Towering in front of Christoph right now is a statue. It's arms outstretched like the Virgin Mary. But the plaque says this. This is a statue of Pocahontas. It's not absolutely bronze, but it's a metal statue. It's tall as I am and I'm just under six foot. It's an unusual legacy for the place, then, isn't it? It's a very unusual legacy. There aren't too many Native Americans in Britain at all that I'm aware of, and almost none in the Kingdom of Kent. So what is Pocahontas' relationship with Graveon? How does her story and this place intersect? What happened, of course, was that Pocahontas, who was then known as Rebecca Rolf, was brought over to this to the UK from Virginia by her husband, John Rolf. Not John Smith, lots of people get that terribly muddled. She certainly wouldn't want to marry John Smith, he was a right pillock. Anyway, so John Rolf, who she did marry, and what then happened was, of course, he wanted to bring her over to this country, as a walking three-dimensional advertisement for people to invest in tobacco, which is what he grew in Virginia, and also to get white people to come over to Virginia as colonists. She was paraded around, like this successful example of colonization. Matoka was not actually a princess in her culture. She was the daughter of an important chief, but Princess is how she was presented to the English public, and that idea has stuck. Hey, look, here's this nice, behaved, young native woman, who's beautiful and does whatever we want, and colonization's going really well. No one's getting murdered, there's no sexual assault happening. See, everything's nice, so she was like this propaganda piece. She was taken up to London, where she was supposed to have met King James I, and he's queen, but we're not absolutely sure that she ever met James I formally, because King James I, who had been, of course, King James VI of Scotland, and he became in 1603 King James I of England as well, one thing he couldn't abide was smoking or tobacco. So I think he went shopping or cleared off somewhere else when she and her husband arrived, and they were received by the queen. However, all the story books say that they've always got a picture of James I, the first there, but I'm pretty sure he would have said something like this. I don't even want these people coming in the mail, palace of that filthy stinky weed. I don't want it, these brown stains on my garbage. I'm off. The grave's in, really, was like so many things in history. A pure accident. It's an accident because of where Graves' in seats. Christophe has brought us down to the shoreline, which is dotted with industrial buildings in the odd chimney stack, and you realise this isn't just any shoreline. This town has a port on the river Thames. In fact, it's one of the last ports you can stop at on your way out of England. Graves' in is directly on the river. Today, we're looking at a sort of brown river, really, which has not got an awful lot of shipping on it at all. There's one large ship coming up. She would have been amongst the great forest of masts. Back then, in the year 1617, this waterway would have been filled with ships. But on one particular ship here, making its way back to Virginia, something terrible happened. She was already on the way back on board the ship. She'd picked up a nasty disease and nobody knows what it was, but it could be cholera, it could be smallpox, it could be tuberculosis, it could even be just the flu. She was really ill by the time the ship got to Graves' in, so they brought her a shore and she died. Or did she die on board the ship and they brought the dead body, that's one of the many things about Pocahontas we don't actually know. No, we don't. But Matoca's older sister and other representatives of her people were with her when she died. What they reported back, their interpretation of what happened, is far more insidious. She mysteriously fell ill within like 15 minutes of living England and died. And according to traditional knowledge, she was murdered. They didn't want her to go back to her homelands and stop becoming this propaganda piece. There were other natives that were with her on the ship who didn't die. From their perspective, that is exactly what happened is that she was murdered. Saying that she fell ill, you know, randomly and died definitely absolves her captors of any responsibility. Poison or illness? The truth is, beyond the accounts that were given at the time, it's very hard to give a definitive, scientifically provable answer of exactly how that girl died. But for Derek and Lauren, this death illuminates an undeniable issue that to this day, after centuries, still persists. In a wide lens, she is the first missing and murdered indigenous women. Missing and murdered indigenous women and girls is a huge problem that started back then and persists to this day. 12 times more likely to be murdered or go missing than any other demographic group. And four out of five indigenous women experience violence and their lifetime. So those are chilling, real world statistics. This isn't a thing of the past. This is happening today. Part of the story is learning the truth about what happened to Pocahontas, what happened to Matoka. But it's also connecting and realizing, oh, this issue is also still happening today. And if she was truly murdered, that's serious. That's a serious situation. And now, to this day, she lies buried in Graves End England, where people like Christoph find themselves explaining to a tourist group after tourist group that the story they have in their heads is nothing like the reality. Put yourself in this business. So one of your daughters is kidnapped, taken and bought a foreign ship. And then, suddenly, has to change her name, her religion, her clothes, her food, just about everything that there was about her and become Rebecca Rolf. A Christian in White Man's clothing, which the only real engraving we have of her, makes it she looks like she's incredibly uncomfortable. It points to anything but love. It points to politics, to money, and to a very controlling relationship. And so again, you're left trying to triangulate these clues from her life to work out how she would have felt about all of these twists and turns in this very short, life story. How should history view her? She means different things to different people. People think it's an easy story, right? They've seen the Disney version. That's what it's about. No, it's extremely complicated. And it's not every indigenous person sees her in the same way. This is Dr Ashley Spivey. I'm a member of the Pomunky Indian tribe. I have APHD and anthropology. And the Pomunky tribe is important because Matoca was connected to the Pomunky tribe through her father. So, you know, this is why there is a close connection to Pocahontas because of who her father was. And one night on the phone from Virginia, USA, Dr Ashley answered a question I'd been wondering for a while. This may seem like a spicy question, so I'm just going to trust you to go with me on this. Ashley, how sick are you of talking about Pocahontas? Well, it's not that I'm necessarily sick of talking about Pocahontas. Several of us in the Virginia Indian community and I do not presume to ever speak for the Virginia Indian community. But obviously being a member of that community and it's frustrating, right? That's typically the place where people want to start and end. When there's, you know, so much more beyond Pocahontas, that's where the frustration comes. It's like, oh, again. But she's been kind of propped up and her legacy has been propped up by not indigenous people as kind of like the signifier of, you know, the ultimate quote, unquote, good Indian. So, let's agree here and now, Dr. Spivey, that we start there, but we do not end there. That does that sound good. And to really understand the life of that girl, according to Ashley, it's important to understand the community she came from, one that still lives today, the Pomunky people. Ironically, you know, where I typically start to smoke a harness for folks, because I guess you are part of the problem here. I am. No, no, no, I'm kidding. She's a, she's a good touching off point because, right? I mean, everybody's heard of Pocahontas. We are, like, ancestrally, historically and contemporarily located in the coastal area of the state of Virginia. This area in Virginia was one of the 13 original British colonies that would go on to become modern day America. And what happened here between the British and the Pomunky people would actually go on to influence how all First Nations people in America would be treated. Our treating negotiations were happening before the United States even existed. And they were happening with the English, how the British and then the United States dealt with Indians, so to speak, and here in this country kind of all really started here on the East Coast, if Virginia was a big player in that. So why is it then of all of the different stories of the colonization of America? Why is it that this one has stuck in the public imagination? Oh, yeah, that is a question. If you look at it from, I think, a non-indigenous perspective, like why her image, her legacy has kind of just really stuck for the last 400 years. And I think it's because, especially here in Virginia, right, where you have, oh my gosh, you have probably thousands of people who claim to sin and see from her. Remember, she had a son with an Englishman. She's seen as kind of like this legitimacy to, you know, non-indigenous people being here, if that makes sense. Like, oh, look, we have this indigenous connection through Pocahontas. For Dr. Ashley, even before Pocahontas became a movie for kids, it was already a fairy tale, one that had fueled America's perception of its first nation's people for centuries. Pocahontas represents this noble side of stereotypes that have developed around Indian people in our country, where she's seen as quote unquote, like I said, the good Indian. Look, she married an Englishman, she converted to Christianity and gives this kind of, again, legitimacy to English invasion. We were successful in that assimilation attempt. And she was literally propped up as that by the colonial government, by the British government, look what we can do with the Indians, you know, in this colony. So what does Ashley think of Disney's Pocahontas movie? Disney, unfortunately, did a lot more harm than it did good representation matters, but it doesn't work if it's so grossly inaccurate that it wipes away any kind of positive portion of that representation. Like in Graves End, in the UK, the final resting place for Matoca, Christoph Bull stands at the memorial plaque that was written for Pocahontas, with its own particular brand of storytelling. Gentle and human, she was the friend of the earliest struggling English colonists, whom she nobly rescued, protected and helped. There's just just a touch of bovine excrement there. I mean, stories are fine if you know, and you make it clear, that they are stories. But as a greatest as the fairy tale version of Pocahontas may be, Christoph reckons there's actually a far more damaging fairy tale that needs to be punctured on the land where he stands. The British Empire narrative is when I was at school and they just told you, "Great big dollots of bovine excrement about all sorts of things and made them to be wonderful." "Oh, aren't we civilising and my goodness me, we are the greatest things since one batson and maple syrup." And of course it's just not true. It was a brutal world, that's the way it was. We wouldn't like to do that now. We can't turn history back, but we do have control over the present. And that's why the Pocahontas story has to be given to people, but it needs to be Waltz and all. People need to know the truth as far as we know it, good or bad. Because even the British will have to grow up at some time and realise that they can't just have fairy stories. There's a real world out there, full of history, which is like our own lives as individuals and lives of all nations. Terrible mistakes are made, and brilliant things are done. So, is there anything that can be done with this unfinished legacy? Well, Dr Ashley Spivey has a message to everyone listening, who's non-native. The biggest thing, and I know it's just kind of reiterating the fact that we are here. We never went away. And we have extremely rich and complex and complicated histories that we are excited to and want to share with the world. This might seem like a weird question, but does it ever get exhausting constantly being on somebody else's learning curve? I am laughing because, not because it's funny, but because you hit the nail on the head. It's beyond exhausting, but at the same time, we want folks to understand that that constant education requires the labour of having to relive some really ugly moments. This isn't the past for us. This isn't something that we can just wrap up in a box and kind of put away and bring out what we want to. It is a part of the fabric of who we are and how we see ourselves embedded within the history and the social relationships in our country. And we want folks to understand that, but it is not easy work. And yet, as long as Walt Disney's Pocahontas movie exists on streaming services and DVDs and videos and in merch, its ideas, its perception will permeate culture. So for Derek and Lauren, how do you go about tackling that? They can use our audio. They could just switch it all up. I would really like to see a statement from them, winning up to the way they've harmed Indigenous people through their telling of Pocahontas. How do you feel about her as a human being? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, she played a pivotal role. Her marriage was a piece brokerage between the English and the Powhatan, literally. I mean, that, and it's documented that that marriage was, in many ways, shapes and forms meant to stop the violence that was happening. It's referred to as the first Anglo-Powhatan War. Nobody wants to live with the fact that this romanticized Disney Princess was actually 10 years old, kidnapped, raped, and eventually died by 20 years old. That's not fun for people to realize. It's not comfortable for people. I feel like so many people get so comfortable with half-truths, people get so comfortable with not owning up to our history. It's actually a double theft. It's theft of her, and it's theft of the story. I think the closest thing to justice would be the truth coming out and everyone knowing what really happened to her. This is just one story of hundreds of thousands that happened to my people throughout this ongoing genocide. They tried to erase our lives and our narratives, but we are still here. And now you know the truth. Spread this knowledge. Stuff the British Stole is produced by Leah Simone Bowen, Eunice Kim, and Zoe Ferguson. It's written, edited, and created by me, a Mark Fennel. The sound engineering and design is by Martin Peralta. Very special thank you to Rose, De La Rabetti, Chief Robert Gray, and Laura Antonelli. The executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak for CBC Podcasts and Amruthus Sleep for ABCRN. Stuff the British Stole is a co-production of ABCRN and CBC Podcasts, and that is the end of Season 3. We'll see you again in 2024.