Terese Marie Mailhot: Get your Disney princesses out of Indian Country

When I got tuberculosis, my mother told me about a Powhatan girl who got the European disease, just like me. My mother told me about an Indian girl who turned to Christianity, just like my grandmother did after being taken into boarding school. Disney perpetuated the ugly rumor that Pocahontas was a “gentle savage,” who co-signed colonization.

The Atlantic’s Sophie Gilbert would like me to adopt Disney’s Pocahontas, while, on the fringe, there’s a call for submission for Native artists to “Take Back Tiger Lily.” Four Winds literary magazine is calling all Natives to reclaim Peter Pan’s Tiger Lily as our own. They say, “Many argue that we ought to eschew Tiger Lily altogether, valorizing a more authentic character. But she is still an Indian princess, the sort young girls on and off reservations across America look to as a model, having very few authentic representations of their lives in the public sphere.” I don’t want Tiger Lily back anymore than I want Disney’s version of Pocahontas in my house. Tiger Lily is Europe’s nineteenth century depiction of their eighteenth century “Squaw.” My kids have plenty of Indian women to look up to, and they will learn to abhor racist depictions just like I did.

I’m working to obliterate Tiger Lily and Disney’s Pocahontas while The Atlantic and Four Winds magazines are trying to save every decaying romantic image of Indian femininity. I’m not some Captain Save-a-Princess. Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie was a creepy man who inspired Michael Jackson. His writing depicted Indians as savages adorned with scalps. I’m not a Captain Save-a-Hippie either. I want everything that intrudes on Indian’s right to live without racism or romanticism to die along with the old racists who invented them. Get your Disney Princesses and get out.