Home | WebMail | Register or Login

      Calgary | Regions | Local Traffic Report | Advertise on Action News | Contact

Posted: 2017-11-29T22:58:32Z | Updated: 2017-11-30T18:38:47Z

Most people are horrified when President Donald Trump uses Pocahontas as a racial slur to attack Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). But few, if any, are more disturbed by his political punchline than indigenous women.

Trump first adopted Pocahontas as dig against Warren during his 2016 presidential campaign, when he repeatedly accused the senator of lying about her Native American ancestry. Trump used the phrase again on Monday , during a ceremony meant to honor Navajo Code Talkers .

HuffPost spoke to several native women after the incident. They all said they were deeply bothered by Trumps comments, which overlook the violence many indigenous women still experience today. Holding up Pocahontas as a caricature of native heritage, they said, ignores the abuse she endured.

It sends the message that natives are invisible, said Caroline LaPorte, a descendent of the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians and senior native affairs policy adviser for the National Indigenous Womens Resource Center.

[Pocahontas] is basically our first well-documented human trafficking victim in the U.S.

- Caroline LaPorte, National Indigenous Womens Resource Center

Most non-natives are familiar with Disneys version of Pocahontas: an American Indian princess who befriends and falls in love with John Smith, a charming lad sent from England to help colonize the New World. Pocahontas saves Smith from being executed by her father, Chief Powhatan and they all live happily ever after.

Historians and Native American experts vehemently dispute that narrative. What Pocahontas experienced was no love story, LaPorte said.

She was raped and kidnapped, LaPorte told HuffPost. Shes basically our first well-documented human trafficking victim in the U.S. Weve romanticized her story and its just not true. Her story is a story of colonization.