Even in adulthood, it seems, all roads lead back to Walt Disney. Pocahontas was first released back in 1995, but Alicia Elliott is still thinking about its dreamy, torqued, colonized narrative. “When we were kids, we were like, “Wow, Pocahontas is so cool! ” Then you grow up and learn the real story,” she told me in late July over boba tea in Toronto. The real story, in part, is that Pocahontas’s name was Matoaka. She was around eleven when she met John Smith. She was taken away from her community, baptized as “Rebecca,” and brought to England, where she soon died. But they don’t tell you that story when you’re Matoaka’s age, watching her painting “with all the colours of the wind” on VHS.
In the first few pages of Elliott’s new book, And Then She Fell, Pocahontas transforms from a two-dimensional character on television into a delusion of the protagonist, Alice; not only does Pocahontas talk to Alice but she’s argumentative, clever, a little sneering, and woefully direct. “You watched this perverted version of my story all the time,” she says to a teenaged Alice. “Knew the words to all the songs. Even ‘Savages.’ I’ll never understand why Native kids sing along to that one.” Naturally, the depiction of Pocahontas by a Mohawk writer from Six Nations living in Canada will diverge significantly from the story that a team of mostly white people made for Disney almost thirty years ago. It’s a blessing.
