{"id":37316,"date":"2014-09-09T20:44:09","date_gmt":"2014-09-09T20:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=37316"},"modified":"2014-09-09T20:44:09","modified_gmt":"2014-09-09T20:44:09","slug":"i-am-not-pocahontas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=37316","title":{"rendered":"I am not Pocahontas"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am not Pocahontas<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Weeklings<\/a>\u00a0(also in Salon)
\n2014-09-04<\/p>\n

Elissa Washuta<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

AS A COWLITZ Indian<\/a> child, white-skinned and New Jersey<\/a>-born, I grew up fielding the question, \u201cHow much Indian are you?\u201d without any sense of its meaning. Once I was old enough to know that my mother was Indian and my father wasn\u2019t, I began responding \u201cHalf.\u201d It wasn\u2019t until my teenage years that I would ask my mother for the details of my ethnic breakdown. She pulled an index card out of her desk drawer. I knew that I was Cowlitz, Polish, Irish, and Ukrainian, but the card was full of surprising facts as well. What did it mean to be Welch? French?<\/p>\n

The truly shocking information the card carried was my Indian blood quantum<\/a>. I didn\u2019t know that was the term for the sum of the fractions next to Cowlitz and Cascade<\/a>. This was the \u201cHow much?\u201d people had prodded me about, and it wasn\u2019t the half I\u2019d assumed. \u201cWhat are you, a quarter?\u201d people would toss out at times. It wasn\u2019t that. The sum of the Cascade and Cowlitz fractions made an awkward hybrid. I decided it would be nobody\u2019s business.<\/p>\n

I grew up in the time of Native American proverb posters and mass-produced dream catchers. Disney\u2019s Pocahontas<\/em><\/a> was released in 1995, when I was ten. I had outgrown my Barbies<\/a> then, but I still added a Pocahontas doll to my retired collection. I knew that she was a fullblood. She communicated with animals and never wore a jacket. She painted with all the colors of the wind. If someone had asked me to explain the difference between my plastic doll and me, I might have said that she was the real Indian and I was the fake one…<\/p>\n

…Although my tribe doesn\u2019t require me to demonstrate a minimum degree of ancestry, acquaintances\u2019 innocent questions of \u201cHow much?\u201d seem to gesture toward a desire to get at the truth about how far I am from ancestor plucked from Kevin Costner\u2019s<\/a> friendly and doomed band: a real Indian.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow much Indian are you?\u201d, however well-intentioned, implies that alive within me is only a tiny piece of the free, noble Indian that passed on long ago, a remnant from which I am far removed. The questions, individually, are borne from a place of curiosity, but the questions have embedded in a time when blood quantum was used to rob indigenous peoples of rights and, ultimately, lead to our being defined out of existence. Pocahontas<\/a>, in the final scene of the Disney re-creation, sends John Smith back to England and tells him, \u201cNo matter what happens, I\u2019ll always be with you. Forever.\u201d What happens: the viewer is spared the discomfort of a mixed-race happy ending. What happens, historically: Pocahontas is captured by the English, marries John Rolfe<\/a>, has a son, travels to England to serve as the Crown\u2019s symbol of the civilization and Christianization of the \u201cheathens,\u201d and dies there from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-two. The Disney version, in which Pocahontas never fit her feet into heeled shoes and refused to leave the woods (until the afterthought of a straight-to-video sequel), persists…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am not Pocahontas The Weeklings\u00a0(also in Salon) 2014-09-04 Elissa Washuta AS A COWLITZ Indian child, white-skinned and New Jersey-born, I grew up fielding the question, \u201cHow much Indian are you?\u201d without any sense of its meaning. Once I was old enough to know that my mother was Indian and my father wasn\u2019t, I began […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,459,125,8,3015,20],"tags":[17866,4331,17867],"class_list":["post-37316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-history","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-native-americans","category-usa","tag-elissa-washuta","tag-pocahontas","tag-the-weeklings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}