Pocahontas and After Conference hosted by The British Library

I've been accepted to present research from my dissertation at the The British Library and Institute of Historical Research for the Pocahontas and After conference from March 16th-19th. 

Paper Title: Giving Voice to Pocahontas in the 1990s: Decolonial Dramaturgy in Native American Women’s Playwriting. 
 
Abstract:
Pocahontas’s voice does not exist in the archive. She left no account of her own. John Smith recorded and co-opted her story, which was then reiterated in foundational mythologies of the United States. Pocahontas's conversion to Christianity and marriage to a colonist was often interpreted as national permission for colonization. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, Pocahontas was enacted on the American stage, often as a titular character that was not also the center of the plot. In the 1990s Indigenous women performers and playwrights in North America began to re-voice Pocahontas and other famous historical Indigenous women adding alternative interpretations and Indigenous perspectives to the narrative. 
 
In 1990 Kuna and Rappahannock actor and playwright Monique Mojica created and performed Princess Pocahontas and The Blue Spots, a solo performance piece in which Mojica embodies an alternative imagining of Native women's history in the Americas. She gives Pocahontas a voice and perspective outside of the confines of western narratives. Mojica's work is part of a larger movement of indigenous women's playwriting during the 1990's that restages and gives voice to historical Indigenous women like Pocahontas, Sacajawea, and La Malinche. Collectively these playwrights create a decolonial dramaturgy- that is a mode of playmaking that honors indigenous epistemologies and heritages and work that performs a decolonial history, one that shifts and alters the meaning of colonization.