Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca) is a professor and chair of the Department of Indigenous Studies at the University at Buffalo. She is the author of Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations. Her latest book Settler Aesthetics: Visualizing the Spectacle of Originary Moments in The New World was published in November.
In Settler Aesthetics, an analysis of renowned director Terrence Malick’s 2005 film, The New World, Mishuana Goeman examines the continuity of imperialist exceptionalism and settler-colonial aesthetics. The story of Pocahontas has thrived for centuries as a cover for settler-colonial erasure, destruction, and violence against Native peoples, and Native women in particular. Since the romanticized story of the encounter and relationship between Pocahontas and Captain John Smith was first published, it has imprinted a whitewashed historical memory into the minds of Americans.
Introduction: The Spectacle of Originary Moments
The idea for this book, which takes up the Pocahontas story as an originary myth with enduring colonial effects, started in the most colonial of campus theaters, one of many colleges with its own origin myth of saving American Indians and serving as a civilizing voice in the wilderness. As we walked through the theater and past buildings built in the late 1700s, the looming Dartmouth College tower and its history accompanied us in the old New England town of Hanover, New Hampshire. The college had a long history of imagining Indians, an imagination that would lead to generations of alumni participating in “conquest of the west” and other generations of Native American alumni, such as myself, working to unravel the damage. Living in the space of coloniality, I couldn’t bear another majorly funded representation in which the only time an American Indian is lauded is for helping or saving
a white man and in which our demise is assumed and asserted through everyday actions. As a Native feminist scholar, I had very little interest in seeing another film or hearing another story about Pocahontas, but I knew I would be asked many questions about the film and what I thought. The 1995 animated Disney hit film had had such a broad cultural impact, I feared another Pocahontas craze that would elide the real-life issues of the Native people I work on behalf of in my classroom and beyond.
Yet I had heard about the remarkable Native actors who played these important roles in Terrence Malick’s latest film, The New World (2005), and about the use of tribal languages, so my interest was piqued somewhat. I felt a bit hopeful that the film would be an intervention in this fictive, albeit dominant, story of colonial–Indian relations. Malick was after all considered a genius of the American cinema and surely wouldn’t reiterate the fictive, overworn path of Pocahontas saving John Smith in order to birth a new nation. Or would he? I was also curious about the new and alluring lead actress, Q’orianka Kilcher, who was stunning in the posters and trailers. It was to be her breakout role. Besides that, there was a choice of only two films at this particular theater anyway, Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) and The New World, so I decided to take the plunge into the stereotype I would undoubtedly have to address.
From the start of the film, which opens with preordained mapping, I felt furious and tortured as I witnessed the retelling of a violent colonial fantasy, seemingly innocent, that has had a large role in framing how people expect an American Indian women to act, look, or be in the present. The imagining of this first meeting carries with it a feeling of discovery and wonder. Amid scenes of lush grass, trees, fish, and nature, Pocahontas, in a voice-over, offers an invocation for the film: “Come spirit, help us sing the story of our land.” The identity of “us” is left ambiguous as we see the ships approach; indeed, it intentionally could mean all of us viewing the spectacle and witnessing the originary event. This is followed by inserts of water, fish, and Pocahontas’s voluptuous beautiful body. Crickets melodically chirp in this terra nullius, the soundtrack is devoid of human voice, and the land is seemingly untouched by the human. Throughout the film, wildlife dominates over human voices. The camera peers over the shoulders of the Pamunkey who are watching the ships land. The viewer, at once peering out at the ships’ approach, is also invited to partake of the beauty, to feel, hear, and visualize the first encounter and wonderous, untouched cinematic scapes.
This is the precipice of the spectacle of the originary myth; this repetition of images of first encounter is the downfall. The settler aesthetics downplay years of colonial conflict and Indigenous resistance and draw the viewer into the movie and narrative itself. These aesthetics, or critical reflections on how settler art assigns values, and creates and imagines worlds, enable the viewer to lament the loss without being accountable to the afterlife of colonialism. Especially when the story and images are directed with such beauty, we experience the feeling of possibility in the encounter and the feeling that our present didn’t have to be this way. The settler aesthetic merges with that of the sublime, and evokes a greatness at the precipice of encounter. The encounter was, in fact, violent, but in Malick fashion, the violence is not shown directly. It is rather built up throughout the film, outside the frames of beauty. We know the unfortunate violence of colonization happened, but what can we do in the present? Malick’s soundtrack and his visual wonder invite all to mourn the loss of the pristine, while asserting that Indian death and destruction are unfortunate. The celluloid obscures the violent impact of dispossession, which continues today in settler structures where Indigenous people have been and still are ghosted.
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