WMC Beverly Wettenstein Lecture 2023: Pocahontas Chic by Cristina Azocar
Dr. Cristina Azocar, a citizen of the Upper Mattaponi Indian Tribe, gave the inaugural Women's Media Center Beverly Wettenstein History Lecture on March 30, 2023. Her lecture drew on material from an essay, written by Dr. Azocar and Ivana Markova in Matoaka, Pocahontas, Rebecca: Atlantic Identities and Afterlives, Kathryn N. Gray, and Amy Morris, eds., an excerpt from which you will find below.
“Pocahontas chic” is what I jokingly dubbed the leather fringe fashion trend that I noticed the first time I visited Miami, Florida, in the early 2000s. As a young graduate student, I just thought it was weird and tacky. I hadn’t heard of “cultural appropriation” at that point, although it had entered the lexicon of cultural studies more than two decades before. Because cultural appropriation was not a term I encountered in my reading or classes, it was not on my radar. Although I was appalled by sports teams that used Indian mascots and their fans that donned fake headdresses, performed tomahawk chops, and sang offensive songs, I didn’t connect Pocahontas chic and the mascots as similar forms of exploitation and violence, that as an Indigenous person, I had come to expect. I am a citizen of the Upper Mattaponi Tribe. Pocahontas was Pamunkey on her father’s side and Mattaponi by her mother. The myth of Pocahontas, and the reality of who she was, has been with me since childhood.
Pocahontas has only recently become a figure again in my life, as I had forgotten about Pocahontas chic long ago. And, until the Disney rendition of her came out in 1995, I didn’t think much of her again until that walk along Ocean Drive on Miami Beach. I did not watch the film then, and I only watched it now for purposes of research. And then she popped up again in the film The New World. I remember watching it for free in a movie theater and laughing about how ridiculous the film was, but also thinking that it was typical. Almost twenty years later, as I was researching my book News Media and the Indigenous Fight for Federal Recognition (2022), her name came up in almost every historical document.
Unfortunately, Pocahontas chic has been a feature of Anglo-settler culture for almost two hundred years. This essay illustrates how myriad portrayals of Pocahontas chic continue, borrow, or exploit original Indigenous textiles and practices and help perpetuate harmful stereotypes about Indigenous women.
A quick internet image search turns up seemingly endless contemporary examples of “Pocahontas chic.” These images generally come with text that illustrates the common language used around Pocahontas and other Indigenous women, historical or not. For example, alongside the Disney-inspired Pocahontas Halloween costume, [AQ1] the advertiser asks the buyer to “Transform into the Powhatan Princess who loves nature and strives to restore peace between her tribe and the English settlers after falling in love with John Smith by putting on the dress and necklace included in the purchase of this ensemble.” The text that accompanies images like these only ever adds to the exploitation of and violence against Indigenous women, which began in popular media more than a century ago. Notably, searches of the Women’s Magazine Archive, which holds well-known titles such as Good Housekeeping, Women’s Day, Seventeen, Vogue, and Cosmopolitan, and a chronological range from 1800 to 2005, produced 296 search results for “Pocahontas.” The results are a mix of advertisements, fashion spreads, journalism, and fiction, published between 1849 and 2004. A myth of Pocahontas is apparent throughout this 155-year span and it’s worth detailing these examples to emphasize the persistence of this unfettered media representation. Through advertising and journalistic features, it’s the accumulation of Pocahontas references and appropriations that generates the potency of this discussion and debate.
In advertising, Arrowhead’s Pocahontas hosiery was “built for service—and style,” according to an advertisement in Good Housekeeping in 1929; in 1949 you could purchase the Famous Lovers salt and pepper shakers and sprinkle your spices from Pocahontas and John Rolfe figurines. New shoes from the Belgrade Company had an interestingly worded advertisement in a 1956 edition of Seventeen: “paleface gladly surrender to the Indian charm of Pocahontas by Moxees . . . Pocahontas walks straight into the heart of John Smiths everywhere—with tender trap of moccasin fringe—soft, soft leather—war-paint colors. For very few beads—less than $9—at trading posts everywhere.” Colors include Indian maize and teepee tan. In 1980, Pocahontas “never had it so good” in a fashion spread in Cosmopolitan: “You’re all set up with chaps and boots and other cowgirl gear, now spend some wampum on the American Indian Princess look! Squaw duds sported by Lila have fabulous fringe benefits. Look also for turquoise and silver jewelry, beaded headbands, laced deerskin vests, and soft, white moccasins, of course.” In Seventeen magazine’s 1968 fashion spread called “Let’s Play Cowboys and Indians,” two frightened-looking women walking among birch trees ask, “‘Why big ranchers sneak yonder in Indian hills?’ ‘To spy on fashion powwow. Ssh.’ POW! Buckskin leather news. WOW! Fringes and bead put-ons.” The two models wear a “Pocahontas buckskin wrap skirt,”[BB2] [CA3] “‘ceremonial’ beading headband,” and “Heap-wide cinch, for mini-ha-ha waist, of buckskin buckled and fringed.” Cosmopolitan was into Pocahontas as a super-fashion-hero in 1999. One edition tells readers to head to page 88 for “Trends to Try: Pocahontas Power.” The greatest Western-inspired wear for your wampum. In 2002, a fashionista could jazz her daisy dukes up if she was “feeling like Pocahontas?” She could “wear a raw-edged pair with moccasins[CA4] .”[BB5] [CA6] Another edition includes “Pocahontas Power. Go Western with tiny touches of Native American beading and Super-plush suede.”
Turning to journalism, a travel story in Town and Country from 1969 about Palm Springs is accompanied by a photo of a woman in a “Buckskin jacket with fringe swinging to make Pocahontas envious.” A brief for an upcoming journalistic story in 1972 Cosmopolitan teases, “Indian Girls Don’t Laugh. What has befallen Indian maidens since Captain John Smith whisked Pocahontas away on his trusty frigate? David Shaber visits reservations to report on why liberation (and jobs, independence and fun) seems to be passing these shy, doe-eyed women by.” And from the story, the duality of the mythical woman: “Pocahontas incarnate, her long black hair drawn into a single braid and that hanging girlishly in front of her shoulder practically down to her waist, where the bottom is seductively tied up with a big bow of red yarn. Her tiny black eyes shift quickly about the room; on her head a jockey cap perches at a rakish angle, and her lips are made up in flaming red. Momma has a few things going for her, all right” (italics added). Finally, She (London) magazine ran a series on women in history in 1986: “Savage Saviour Pocahontas, the Indian squaw who saved a colony and became an English Lady: the facts behind her legend are extraordinary enough.” The third paragraph reads, “Everybody, of all races, should make a fuss of her. She offered an alternative to genocide—love, peace and intermarriage instead of hatred, war and dispossession. She was a North American Indian squaw and before she became Rebecca Rolfe, her name was Pocahontas.”
Throughout the history of these media representations the implicit violence of the appropriated image becomes evident. The fantasy image of Pocahontas chic protects[CA7] [BB8] a white colonizer image imbued with racist ideas that support hegemonic ideologies and that are perpetuated through cultural appropriation. Pocahontas has not just been subjugated through cultural appropriation, however, but both her person, her people, and her image have been victimized through the cultural commodification that accompanies the appropriation. All forms of media are responsible for immortalizing Pocahontas as a hypersexual child who betrayed her people for the love of a white man.
Pocahontas was born Matoaka, and her mother was Pocahontas, who was Mattaponi, and her father was Wahunsenaca, better known as Powhatan because he was the paramount chief of the Powhatan nation, which consisted of many tribal groups of Algonquin-speaking people. Matoaka was given the name Pocahontas by her father when her mother passed away. She most likely would not have been famous if Captain John Smith hadn’t claimed, so that he could perpetuate his own status with his funders in England, that she saved him. Pocahontas, who would have been ten or eleven at the time of the famous “saving,” was an important Powhatan figure. She was becoming a gifted medicine woman and was spiritually important to the tribe. Smith, who would have been twenty-seven at the time, did not have a high status, and so may have used her to gain it with King James who had chartered the Virginia Company in 1606. Other scholars have gone into much more depth than I will about Smith’s dubious claims and how it supports settler-colonial beliefs, but it’s an unlikely story that was either created, embellished, and/or misinterpreted for a number of reasons, the most important for Smith bring to gain the confidence of the English royalty to continue to finance his expeditions. From the beginning, Pocahontas’s identity was always and already appropriated and commodified.
Appropriation and Commodification: Violent Consequences of Sexualized Imagery in Fashion and Film
Cultural appropriation inevitably serves the interests of the appropriator and actively takes from the appropriated. Cultural appropriation distorts a culture in order to exploit it, corroding the reality of that culture into a stereotype that supports colonial structures. Indigenous people have actively sought to ensure that others do not profit from our culture, but the rules are easy to avoid. Although the United States Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 is supposed to protect tribes, its effect is limited to certain kinds of appropriation. But, the law only protects US federally recognized tribes and their members rather than all creative arts. The Pamunkey Tribe wasn’t federally recognized until 2015 and the Mattaponi are only recognized by the state of Virginia, however the Upper Mattaponi were federally recognized in 2018. And fashion designs cannot be copyrighted.
Cultural appropriation and cultural commodification are two added elements in the continued violence toward Indigenous cultures. All sectors of media are responsible for practices that perpetuate stereotypes and capitalize on ignorance and justify the ennobled and sexualized image of Native women and the destruction of Native culture. According to the Justice Department (2019), more than half of all American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/IN) women have experienced violence. Amnesty International has reported that one in three AI/IN women have been raped, which is more than twice the average for non-Native women; also, AI/AN female victims of sexual violence experience violence at the hands of a non-Native perpetrator (96 percent). Recently, more attention has been given to the problem of missing and murdered Indigenous women; this crisis of violence against Indigenous women is revealed in the statistics from the Bureau of Indian Affairs: More than 1.5 million AI/IN women have experienced violence in their lifetime; The murder rate is ten times higher than the national average for women living on reservations and is the third leading cause of death for Native women. Additionally, AI/IN WERE significantly more likely to experience a rape in their lifetimes compared to other women. According to the National Crime Information Center, in 2016 there were 5,712 reports of missing AI/IN women and girls in the US Department of Justice’s federal missing persons database, but the national information clearinghouse and resource center for missing, unidentified, and unclaimed person cases across the United States, called the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NameUs) only logged 116 of those cases.
The oversexualization of Indigenous women as a contributing factor in the extent of the violence against AI/AN is exacerbated in the coexistence of media and fashion. Their images are objectified, and the static historical “costumes” are considered authentic, useful in ensuring that colonialism maintains its subjugation of and hold on Indigenous women through their dehumanization and use as sexual conveniences. While seemingly a “hipster” trend, scantily clad women sporting headdresses, wearing “Navajo” panties, and drinking out of those same “Navajo” flasks are part of that savage sexualization. All of this is wrapped up in the pernicious desire of white people to “play Indian,” starting with the Boston Tea Party in 1773 and continuing today. Dressing up like Indians has allowed non-Indians to embody noble-savagery by allowing them to both hate Indians and at the same time desire to glorify them. I’m purposely switching to the term Indian here. Playing Indian performs both a physical and emotional meaning that signifies freedom and innocence. Pocahontas chic as part of women’s fashion is an example of playing Indian and a continuation of the Indian princess / squaw stereotype. In this context, Pocahontas was seemingly “corrupted by the material artifacts of white culture” and “was willing to prostitute herself to white men” through appropriation. Women’s fashion has often been about rebelling against and owning sexuality at the same time, a dynamic that Pocahontas chic exacerbates. Pocahontas chic is a fashion that draws on a nostalgic view of a fantasy interaction. Wrapped up in the myth of America is a mythical Pocahontas relegated to a fantasy of simplicity, purity, and wholeness: a Disney rendition of a static culture.
Pocahontas chic is both sexy and submissive. Pocahontas chic is a child dressed up as a woman that distorts concepts of what and how Native women actually are for the maintenance of control over the myth and to hyper-sexualize us, which in turn reinforce our savageness, our femininity, and our wish to be simultaneously rebellious and colonized.
In 2012, the oversexualized short, brown-with-fringes, skimpy dress that Disney Pocahontas wore transformed into a brown-with-fringes Victoria’s Secret bikini. One of the most outrageous uses of the Indigenous head dress, a cultural artifact, was when it was worn by a half-naked model at a Victoria’s secret fashion show, watched by millions of people. Runway audiences predominantly include younger viewers— the two highest demographic groups are under eighteen years old and between eighteen and twenty-four years old—for whom cultural appropriation is very influential. Stereotypes are seeded in adolescents through media and by design creators. Pocahontas chic is at once primitive, noble savage, exotic, and honoring of Native culture—or so it professes to be. But each of these iterations is part of the systematic destruction of the Indigenous people; they each seek to civilize and maintain the colonial grip.
Similarly in film, Terrance Malick’s The New World propelled an even more sexualized version of Pocahontas into the twenty-first century. This film relies on tropes that were identified with Indigenous people long before they hit the big screen. It takes all agency away from Native women, not just Pocahontas, and defines them in terms of white people while demonizing them against their own people. What’s most disturbing about the film, which had somewhat accurate clothing depictions, was the very sexualized scenes with actor Q’orianka Kilcher, age fourteen and Colin Farell, who was twenty-nine at the time, and, to lesser extent, Christian Bale, who was thirty-one. Although Kilcher is the star as Pocahontas, she has very few speaking lines. When she, or any of the Native characters speak their language, it is not translated. Pocahontas is characterized as primitive until she gets to London.
The commodification of Indians through fashion, film, and media works to both civilize Indians, and to keep them in their past. The nostalgic, stoic forms of Pocahontas chic are part of the propaganda of continuing colonization. Commodification supports the hegemonic structure by capitalizing on the stereotype of Indian cultures. Pocahontas was used to sell products in the nineteenth century such as cigars, perfume, and flowers. None of these benefit the Powhatan Tribes. But most consumers of products, fashion, and media are not aware that their participation in the commodification of Pocahontas has exploited Indian identity. The commodification has Americanized her myth and further appropriated her as the noble savage. And this commodification began with the Virginia Company because of its need for a story to keep pumping funds into their settlements. It has been kept alive in various media forms as a love story.
Pocahontas became Lady Rebecca when she was forced to go to England in 1616. She was just the best known of the likely hundreds of Indigenous women to be kidnapped and then murdered by colonists. Many portraits of her were painted, although most were not painted until the nineteenth century and by then her fate as a happily assimilated/colonized Indian woman was fixed. Her skin appears white in many of these paintings, as though she has fully become English, her body made “legible for English eyes” so that her story is appropriated as an English one and not a Native one. Pocahontas’ story is fully American now, however, and its visibility in fashion as Pocahontas chic present in many media forms.
NOTE: References and citations have been removed for brevity. Please visit the chapter to see all references and citations.
This excerpt is derived from an essay written by Cristina L. Azocar and Ivana Markova, PhD in Matoaka, Pocahontas, Rebecca: Atlantic Identities and Afterlives, Kathryn N. Gray, and Amy Morris, eds.. excerpts from pp. 204-223. © 2024 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. Reprinted by permission of the University of Virginia Press.
Press Release: Dr. Cristina Azocar to Give Inaugural Women's History Lecture for Women's Media Center Series at Westfield State University
Press Coverage: Westfield State University illustrates women’s representation in American media, NBC/WWLR, March 29, 2023
Press Coverage: Dr. Cristina Azocar Visits Westfield State as Inaugural Speaker in National Women’s History Lecture Series, Westfield State University, March 30, 2023
