In I Sing to Use the Waiting, Zachary Pace writes about how women singers shaped their coming-of-age and discovering their queerness. Throughout the collection, the writer explores a variety of topics, including an essay about how Disney’s Pocahontas reinforces racist, misogynistic, and homophobic views.
Below is a short Q&A with Zachary Pace about I Sing to Use the Waiting and the essay “Colors of the Wind.” An excerpt of the essay follows.
Can you briefly summarize the excerpt you’re sharing with readers today?
This essay considers the problematic nature of the theme song from Disney’s Pocahontas, and how it plays into the movie’s subliminal racism, misogyny, and homophobia, which reinforces certain white supremacist and hetero-patriarchal values that can have a profound influence on young viewers—such as myself, at age ten in 1996, when I first watched it. The essay also attempts to portray the real-life story of Pocahontas, based on my readings of various historical accounts.
What was the writing process like for this specific essay? What was the hardest part to get right?
It started with repeated viewings of Pocahontas during the initial pandemic lockdown in 2020. Around that time, I was part of a queer socialist reading group, which opened my eyes to the ways that capitalist society perpetuates the conditions for homophobia, misogyny, and racism—and that the fight for liberation from these systems is thoroughly intersectional. I juxtapose these experiences side by side in the essay, but I almost cut the story about my time with the reading group because I couldn’t figure out how to make it relevant. Then, one of my editors at Two Dollar Radio, Eric Obenauf, encouraged me to go deeper into the telling of that story, and it ultimately led me to both the main theme of the essay and the grand finale of the book. I also read two biographies and a few academic essays about Pocahontas, and I watched several interviews with the movie’s creators and performers.
How does this excerpt speak to the larger collection?
The essay opens with my memory of singing the Pocahontas theme song, recording it on a blank cassette, and being humiliated when I played it back and heard what’s called the “air-conducted sound” of my voice for the first time (as opposed to “bone-conducted sound,” which you hear when you’re speaking, and which contains bass tones that aren’t present in your air-conducted voice). This is the second-to-last essay in the book. The first essay examines the conundrum of the queer voice—the sound in my voice that humiliated me—and it finds that our roles models are a major factor in the early development of our voices. My earliest role models were mostly women singers, and so the collection is a tribute to many of them, from Madonna to Kim Gordon, Cat Power to Rihanna, Nina Simone to Pocahontas.
You mention your role models and I want to zero in on that idea. Who are your writing role models?
This is a great question because a “role model” means more to me than an influence on my writing; they influence my way of “living in the world”—a phrase that reminds me of my teacher and role model Marie Howe. I look to Marie for an example of how to live and engage and do right in the world. I also look to Eileen Myles, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Hilton Als, whose writing and friendship help me live and engage in the world.
Now that your book is out, I’m curious how you feel it changed you as a writer. What was learned? What do you still want to work on? Where do you want to take your writing next?
I feel a little bit more confident in myself—or at least, in my ability to turn a vague idea into a piece of writing. I’m in the vaguest idea stage of writing about some more musicians, and I’ve learned that repetitive listening to those musicians is my only way forward. I also realized, while writing the last piece for the book, that most readers can easily access the audio and visuals I’m writing about, so I want to be sure that I’m not describing something that someone could easily see or hear for themselves, but something that I notice through my repetitive listening.
An excerpt from from “Colors of the Wind: On Pocahontas“
1.
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the midst of a state-mandated lockdown—quarantined in an apartment built on the land once known as Lenapehoking by the Leni Lenape tribe, renamed Breuckelen by Dutch colonizers, and now known as Brooklyn, New York—I watched and re-watched Disney’s Pocahontas.
At age ten, I’d sung “Colors of the Wind”—the theme song of Pocahontas—into the microphone of a boom box and recorded myself on a blank cassette tape. That day, when I played the recording, I was humiliated to hear—effeminate inflection, nasal vowels, slight lisp—a queer voice. Queerness was still beyond my comprehension then, but I intuitively understood the sound could be considered dissonant from my gender presentation, and so, it struck me as embarrassing. Of hearing my own voice, this is my earliest memory.
2.
At age ten, the historical figure we call Pocahontas experienced mere traces of the events depicted in the Disney animation of 1995.
Born circa 1596, named Matoaka, renamed Amonute, and nicknamed Pocahontas, she’s believed to have been the daughter of Powhatan, the chief of about thirty American Indian tribes living in the area then known as Tsenacommacah, where England colonized Jamestown, Virginia.
Disney dramatizes a romance that didn’t truly transpire between Pocahontas and English captain John Smith. In reality, beyond the timeline encompassed by the movie (but loosely portrayed in its sequel), Pocahontas married John Rolfe, a tobacco plantation owner, in 1614—following her capture by the Jamestown colonists, conversion to Christianity, and baptism as “Rebecca.” In 1616, she traveled to London—where she was presented to the royal court as an example of an American Indian who’d been successfully “civilized”—and there, in 1617, after contracting tuberculosis, she passed away before she could return home.
The earliest record of Pocahontas’s existence appeared in A True Relation of Virginia, published in 1608 by the real-life John Smith, who’d joined the Virginia Company, chartered by James I, to build settlements along what we now call the North American coast. The animation depicts Smith as debonair as any Disney protagonist—blond-haired and blue-eyed—voiced by Mel Gibson (who was, at that time, an American sweetheart, not yet known for his ultraconservatism). In reality, John Smith appeared rugged—his portrait at the National Portrait Gallery engraved with bristly beard and furrowed brow, his statue at Jamestown National Historic Site cast as squat and thickset—and he had a reputation for antagonism; en route from London, the ship’s captain charged him with mutiny and sentenced him to execution, but owing to Smith’s dexterity for exploration, his life was spared and he became instrumental in the establishment of the colony.
Smith’s True Relation of Virginia reads: “Powhatan understanding we detained certain savages, sent his daughter, a child of ten years old, which not only for feature, countenance & proportion, much exceedeth any of the rest of his people, but for wit, and spirit, the only Nonpareil of his Country.” Chief Powhatan had sent Pocahontas, Smith writes, as “a token of peace” to “beg the liberty” of the Powhatan tribe members in Smith’s captivity. (And while no records exist concerning a romance between Pocahontas and Smith, he certainly emphasizes her physical appearance—her “feature, countenance & proportion”—here.) Nearly four hundred years later, the Disney musical would embellish and distort this encounter between these two historical figures.
3.
Throughout the summer of 2020, I bicycled to Washington Square Park for a weekly queer reading group called “Down with Rainbow Capitalism,” organized by femme and nonbinary comrades who run a socialist publication called Left Voice.
We’d sit in two or three circles of five or six people—amplifying to be heard above our cloth, surgical, or N95 face masks—and we’d discuss texts that analyzed the intersecting inequities among class, race, gender, and physical ability. At the crux of each conversation: how capitalism created the conditions for classism, racism, sexism, and ableism—by continually deploying class, race, sex, and ability as categories in economic competition. For the comrades, the struggles against racism, sexism, and ableism were inseparable from the struggle against capitalist exploitation—and true queer liberation, only possible in synchronicity with the liberation of all people oppressed under capitalism.
I spoke seldomly, as shy about projecting my queer voice (even in a queer-friendly space) as I was scared of projecting my salivary droplets and aerosols in the pre-vaccine days of a viral pandemic. I listened a lot.
One of the comrades, who’d frequently wear a T-shirt bearing the phrase fuck christopher columbus, once said something along the lines of: What the colonizers considered “savagery” was the queerness of tribal society.
There, I began to understand that the same Eurocentric, patriarchal, racist, religious, and capitalist apparatuses that had colonized the land and imperialized the tribes of Tsenacommacah, Lenapehoking, Mannahatta—where we sat—and all across this so-called country were the same apparatuses that had instilled the homophobic hatred of my own voice in me.
But can I juxtapose these narratives without paternalizing the history?
4.
Irene Bedard was twenty-seven in 1995, when she recorded the speaking voice for Disney’s Pocahontas. Born in Anchorage to an Alaskan mother of Iñupiat and Yup’ik descent and a French Canadian father of Cree descent, Bedard made her screen debut in 1994, in the lead role of the made-for-TV movie Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee, as the real-life Mary Crow Dog. That same year, she starred in Disney’s live-action Squanto: A Warrior’s Tale as the title character’s wife. In 1998, she voiced Pocahontas again for the straight-to-video Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World. And in 2005, she performed the role of Pocahontas’s mother in Terence Malick’s live-action The New World.
Bedard’s 60-plus film and television credits typecast her as the avatar for several of the 574 federally recognized Indian Nations—homogenizing the portrayal of culturally diverse tribes through the “feature, countenance & proportion” of one person: one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People” of 1995. While these roles amounted to a prolific career for Bedard, they inadvertently precluded a spectrum of possibilities for representation (say, a performer of Lakota descent playing the lead in Lakota Woman).
Bedard had studied musical theater at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts—and later pursued a career as a singer; in 2003, she sang in a band and recorded an album with her husband at the time, musician Deni Wilson. But she didn’t provide the vocals for Pocahontas’s singing. Pocahontas’s singing was recorded by a white vocalist named Judy Kuhn.
5.
Pocahontas serenades John Smith with “Colors of the Wind” in their earliest scene together, which is illustrated as a chance encounter that develops into a kind of first date. At the crescendo of Smith’s patronizing flirtation, he refers to Pocahontas and the Powhatans as “savages” (as does the real-life Smith, in his actual account)—and she rejoins in song. Now, Judy Kuhn takes over for Irene Bedard. The melody starts: You think I’m an ignorant savage…
Stephen Schwartz, the soundtrack’s lyricist, writes on his website: “In the song, I basically wanted Pocahontas to address the Eurocentrism of John Smith; so in essence, it’s a consciousness-raising song.” Still, among all the source material I’ve read in reference to “Colors of the Wind,” no one acknowledges the Eurocentrism of hiring a white vocalist for an American Indian character—especially with a trained singer already voicing the part.
Quite the contrary: Kuhn has been perennially celebrated for her contribution—for instance, in 2019, Alan Menken, the score’s composer, said in an interview with Playbill Presents: “There’s an earthiness to her voice that I think fits Pocahontas.” Then, the introductory verse plays in the background: You think I’m an ignorant savage…
Kuhn’s rendition won a Grammy, Golden Globe, and Academy Award for best song, while a rendition by Black vocalist Vanessa Williams reached the top ten of several Billboard charts; Williams’s recording plays as the movie’s credits roll—and omits the introductory verse.
“The verse that takes you to the song proper,” Judy Kuhn said, in the same interview with Playbill Presents, “I always think of the verse as the kind of bridge from speaking—whatever the drama of the scene is that leads you to need to sing—the lyrics to that intro: It’s sort of the challenge, it’s sort of throwing down the gauntlet.”
The gauntlet of the song proper takes its shape from an alleged speech and/or letter delivered by Chief Seattle, the head of a Duwamish tribe in the area we now call Puget Sound, responding to an offer to purchase his territory. On Schwartz’s website, he cites Chief Seattle’s words as the lyrics’ inspiration—and incorrectly cites those words as having originated in a letter to Congress—while, in the Playbill Presents interview, Kuhn incorrectly cites a White House speech. In fact, the now-discredited belief was that Chief Seattle addressed the governor of Washington State in 1854, expressing bewilderment at the concept of purchasing and owning land. The supposed address was transcribed by a Duwamish-speaking English poet and published in 1887 in the Seattle Sunday Star. Another belief holds that Chief Seattle wrote a letter to President Franklin Pierce in 1855, expressing the same bewilderment. However, key details have been widely disputed by historians, and original documents haven’t been located, so the National Archives declared the validity of both legends “very likely spurious.”
6.
In 1616, John Smith wrote a letter to Queen Anne of Denmark, announcing Pocahontas’s visit to London: a letter that describes—and, scholars believe, exaggerates or even fabricates—a scene depicted in numerous engravings and paintings, and which Disney depicts at the movie’s climax. Smith claims he was detained by Powhatan and brought to execution—but Pocahontas (then age twelve or thirteen) “hazarded the beating out of her own brains” to rescue him, purportedly sparing his beheading by shielding his body with her body. Elaborating his claim in The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles—published in 1624, seven years after Pocahontas passed away—Smith wrote, in the third person: “Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death.”
Disney recasts this tableau thirteen minutes from the movie’s conclusion. Following Pocahontas’s recital of “Colors of the Wind,” her clandestine romance with John Smith takes on a Romeo-and-Juliet quality. One night, they abscond to the woods, trailed by both a compatriot of the Virginia Company and the tribe member who Pocahontas’s father intends for her to marry; the former shoots and kills the latter—while Pocahontas and Smith finally kiss—and the tribe brings Smith into custody, where the doomed romance takes on a Christ-and-Magdalene quality. Then, thirteen minutes from the end, during a crucifixion-style ceremony, Chief Powhatan lowers his club toward Smith’s skull and Pocahontas rushes in to sacrifice herself for her paramour. “If you kill him, you’ll have to kill me, too,” she says. “I love him, father.”
This seemed profound to me, at age ten, holding my Pocahontas action figure and harboring my John Smith fetish; after all, she confesses forbidden desire (queer love) to her father, which inspires him to declare peace with his enemies.
And so, in 2020, curious about this human who’s been surrounded by so much fallacy, I compared the fabled episode as it appears in two popular biographies.
My affinity began in ignorance—and intensified the closer I got to the facts.
7.
Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat by Paula Gunn Allen elaborates the episode the way it most plausibly would’ve occurred, determining that the ceremony may have been a symbolic adoptive ritual, wherein Chief Powhatan could’ve strategically formed an alliance with Smith—who probably misinterpreted the proceedings, owing to his misunderstanding of the Powhatan language. Deciphering Pocahontas’s self-sacrificial gesture, Gunn Allen elucidates the “mother right” sociopolitical structure, “in which identity and inheritance derive through the maternal line”; she writes:
Among the Powhatans, women had a deciding say in national policy and action. They also owned the great fields of corn, squash, beans, and other staples. They distributed all food and goods, including what was garnered by men in hunting and fishing. They designed and built the dwellings and the lodges for gatherings. It was natural and logical for the Gift of Life and Death to be bestowed on a woman.
While it’s possible that Pocahontas performed an emblematic role in a traditional ceremony, the material conditions of the mother-right structure contradict the Eurocentric and patriarchal fantasy of the power relations crowning what we think we know of the Disney princess.
Similarly, Pocahontas and the Powhattan Dilemma by Camilla Townsend approaches the episode from a skeptical angle, explaining that Chief Powhatan may have symbolically adopted Smith to preserve political power, but a mock execution wouldn’t have been performed in such a ceremony. Regarding the question of whether Pocahontas participated in the ritual, Townsend determines, “the answer is unequivocally no.” Further, regarding Smith’s initial account of Pocahontas in A True Relation of Virginia, Townsend asks: “Was she really the one then closest to Powhatan’s heart, and did he believe that Smith would know this from his days of captivity and thus recognize her presence as a white flag? Or was she, as the daughter of a commoner and without claims to political power, among the children he could most afford to lose, and thus the one whose safety he chose to risk?” The Disney movie imagines that Pocahontas’s mother had passed away long ago—her father thus portrayed as a widower. According to Townsend, in reality, Pocahontas’s father was polygamous—and her mother’s family not politically significant. The likelihood that the birthright of Pocahontas approximated the status of a Disney princess further diminishes.
But we can’t know anything for certain. “She is visible only in the comments left by the white men who knew her and wrote down their impressions,” Townsend concludes. “The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Pocahontas’s language is largely lost… Thus we cannot even gain insights into Powhatan categories and assumptions by studying texts in their own language.” On that note, Townsend conveys a heartbreaking detail from John Smith’s log of Powhatan phrases: “‘In how many daies will there come hither any more English ships?’ was the very first full sentence Smith recorded. Casa cunnakack, peya quagh acquintan attasantasough?”
8.
Ultimately, I am one of those: a white, male-bodied person writing in English, launching conjectures and drawing conclusions through my exploration of those antiquated comments and impressions. And yet, here, I’m attempting to illuminate both the personal and historical implications of Disney’s Eurocentric, patriarchal, racist, and capitalist influences on young viewers such as myself.
During the summer of 2020, in Washington Square Park, I began to understand that the origins of my attractions, my aversions, and even my indifferences could be traced from my childhood living room to the offices of the production companies that had been, were then, and still are manufacturing the heterosexist and white supremacist standards of normativity in American media. As an impressionable youngster, assembling my identity based on the authority of icons and moving images, I calibrated my value system to match the value systems that I witnessed on-screen.
At age ten, I admired Disney’s Pocahontas because I wished to be desired by a man. Because queerness was still beyond my comprehension, I wished to become a woman, so I could engage in normative romances with men. Pocahontas’s ostensible empowerment—as heroine, as martyr—drew me to her, and I imitated her in song. And in that song, I despised my voice.
9.
Subconsciously, I’d internalized my homophobia by absorbing Disney’s homophobia.
The queerest character in Pocahontas is the villain: Governor John Ratcliffe, who leads the Virginia Company (in reality, he captained a different ship and became president of Jamestown colony). In the movie, he’s animated as an eccentric, rotund, pink-and-purple-clad xenophobe who pillages the earth for gold. And his assistant, Wiggins—a dainty, dandyish, submissive yes-man—is voiced by the same actor. Even Ratcliffe’s dog, Percy, is a fussy, effeminate male pug, who fosters an antagonistic flirtation with Meeko, the androgynous racoon. Thomas, a meek, juvenile company member, also codes queerly; he’s inexperienced with a rifle, which he repeatedly misfires and then holds at crotch-level, ashamed. It’s Thomas who shoots Pocahontas’s suitor, Kocoum, on that fateful night, setting the climax in motion. And on that fateful night, Ratcliffe leads the Virginia Company in a flagrantly gratuitous musical number, “Savages,” wherein they sing the word savages twenty-six times—an overture to the near-execution scene. After Pocahontas rescues Smith, Radcliffe shoots at Chief Powhatan and Smith takes the bullet. The queer villain endangers the figure of American Indian power, enabling Smith, the hetero-patriarchal white savior, to usurp Pocahontas’s act of self-sacrifice with his bravery.
Within the wonderful world of Disney, at best, queerness equals comedy, naivete, and inferiority—mocked in contrast to valiant, nevertheless toxic, masculinity; at worst, queerness equals greed, pollution, and depravity. These standards of normativity provided my foremost exposure to displays of personal and interpersonal conduct, and so, my foundational codes of conduct—my attractions, aversions, and indifferences—were formed by adhering to this inherent and subliminal heterosexism and homophobia.
10.
But I’m learning to find affection for my queer voice.
And I’ve said enough for now.
Now is the time to listen.
From Zachary Pace’s I Sing to Use the Waiting / Two Dollar Radio, Jan 23, 2024
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