Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots

Play Paper
Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots is a contemporary North American/Canadian
performance text centered around the idea of native American women finding their identity in a
world that largely does not acknowledge their heritage outside of "Pocahontas-type" stereotypes.
The play itself is a satire of colonization, where the women in the play search the judgements,
performed stereotypes, and roles that they play, in order to find their truest identity as in between
two worlds. The play, written by Monique Monica, was developed through the Canada council,
the Ontario Council for the Arts, and the Toronto Arts Council. The work is structures through
13 transformations, one for each cycle of the lunar year, which Monique Mojica writes was
unintentional, but it the form which the play takes, and, according to Mojica, "is the form in
which [the stories] must be told."
The play opens with Princess Buttered-on-Both sides performing in the 498th annual Miss
North American Indian Beauty Pageant, where she performs a "ritual" dance, handing out corn in
baggies to the audience, "Dance of the Sacrificial Corn Maiden," and about pining for "John
Whiteman." The performance itself satirizes colonialist views about Native American identity in
general, simply associating them with lovers and planters of corn (with the less than subtle
reference in the name, "Princess Buttered on Both Sides," and the desire for the white man as
lover. Both of the ideas permeate North American cultural recognition of Native American
culture, particular in the most popular versions of the stories about Pocahontas and John Smith,
which are directly referenced later in the play. Created in 1990, the "498th Annual" Miss North

American Beauty pageant directly addresses the beginning of this pageant of Native women
performing western stereotypes of themselves with Columbus' 1492 "discovery" of North
America.
The second transformation is performed by 3 contemporary women, in storytelling, and ritualtype chant, about loss and upkeep of identity. Contemporary women 1 begins by talking about
the "blue spot," which is a physical identifier below the spine on Native American infants. The
speaker says, "even among the half-breeds, it is one of the last things to go," suggesting that the
blue spot itslef, as cultural practices and identifiers fade away, the blue spot at the base of the
spine remains for longer than perhaps the identity itself. The women talks about being born blue,
with the umbilical cord wrapped round her neck, and then her mother checking for the blue spot,
and, in transformation fashion, "birthing" a child onstage," checks her own child for the blue spot
as well. The women begin chanting about identity and heritage in English with native chant
elements.
The third transformation includes the contemporary women, this time joined by Malinche, the
Native American name for a traitor. The contemporary women, 3, are become the four
directions with Malinche, as a performance of identity and self traitorhood.
The subsequent transformations, with the groundworks established in the first few, include more
stories by the contemporary Native American women, intensifying throughout the play, as well
as "Pocahontas/Lady Rebecca/Matoaka," all of the names given to the real-life women who we
now know as simply Pocahontas, as compared to and played separately from "Storybook
Pocahontas," a child who is happy to help the white man and is in love with John Smith.
Included also are Deity/Woman of the Puna/Virgin, Marie/Margaret/Madeleine, Cigar-Store

Squaw, (notably played by the actress who performs "Princess Buttered-on Both Sides," and
"Ceremony, " the embodiment of the puberty ritual and wisdom of the ancestors, among others.
The work as a whole exists in the realm of "transformations," with the transformation of
location, identity, direction, and the fluidity of story, both also within the layers of performed
self and true self as a function of the outside society and acknowledgement of heritage, where the
"real" self is not every pinned down as one entity. The women in the play are represented as
healers, " women are the medicine, so they must go and heal the women," as mothers, as carriers
of heritage, of child bearers and bringers of the uncertain future, and as bringers of new life.