I remember vividly the first time I ever read about native Americans. It was in my junior high school social studies class in Depere, Wisconsin.

The highly waxed tile floors reflected all the rows of desks, the bright ceiling lights, and the sunlight streaming in through the large windows. As I flipped through my social studies book, feeling rather self-conscious as the only brown skinned person in my class, I chanced upon a picture of Squanto holding a fish in his hands and Pocahontas standing next to a white man.

“What’s that?” I wondered, as I frantically flipped the pages again to find the images. A fleeting feeling of pride coursed through me as I took a deep breath and hoped we would study Indians in this class.

I began to turn over single pages and scan each one very carefully for the images I was certain I had seen. I tried to remember the colors and maps I saw in my first flipping of the pages.

Finally, I found it. Pride burst into my soul. I’m an Indian. People will know we have a place in this country. Indians belong here. We were here before the white came and discovered us, I thought.

The painful memory of white boys throwing stones at me in a dead-end alley when I was in third grade, five years earlier, flashed in my mind.

“Nigger. Go back to where you came from,” they yelled. And they laughed.

Through my tears and my arms covering my head and face, I saw their white and distorted faces. Suddenly, a shop owner opened a back door and yelled at the boys.

“Hey! What are you doing?” he yelled.

When the boys froze and turned around to look at the man, I bolted past them and out of the alley. I ran and cried all the way home.

“I’m not a nigger. This is our country. You go back to where you came from,” I said silently to those boys as I ran as fast as I could. Black and white TV images of the civil rights marches flashed through my mind as I found my way to a two bedroom upstairs apartment where the six of us lived. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom from those white people.

“I hate school,” I told my mother. “I’m never going back,” I cried.

As a sullen teenage Oneida and Chippewa Indian girl, I sat in the West Depere junior high school class and stared at Pocahontas for the first time. Other Indian maiden characters I saw in the past were cartoon figures depicted in Thanksgiving decorations. Here, Pocahontas had her own mind and she was brave. I hoped that everyone in my class would learn that Indians were here in this land and this is Indian land.

I read the story about how Squanto taught the starving white settlers to plant corn with fish as fertilizer. Next, I read the story of how Pocahontas rescued Captain John Smith from her father who was about to cut off Smith’s head. I turned the page and saw the end of the chapter and the beginning of a new one. That book, in the 1960s, contained only three pages about Indians.

“Is that all?” I thought. “There must be more.”

I looked through the book again, but found nothing.

“Pocahontas married a white man,” I thought, “Traitor, Squanto should have let them starve.”

As I began to wonder who Pocahontas was and why she chose to save the life of a white man, I still thought of her as a traitor to her own people and culture. I always wonder if Indians who marry outside their tribal group are somehow ashamed of themselves and selling out their own culture, or if they’re truly in love, and are rising above all obstacles.

As I read the many historical documents, dissertations, literary analyses and essays about Pocahontas and her life story, I began to understand the mythical qualities European authors attributed to her. I also began to see the comical misinterpretations European writers had of some Indian traditions, adoption ceremonies, and especially women’s ceremonies.

I learned about how her father never rescued her from her kidnapper, and how she converted to Christianity after a year in captivity.

What kind of choices does a father have to make when his daughter has been kidnapped by invaders and held in exchange for food and weapons? How does a daughter react to a father who never comes to her aid?

I also learned that one white man, who was deeply attracted to her, wrote to his superiors in England for permission to marry her. John Rolfe documented how Pocahontas had renounced her pagan ways, converted to the church, spoke English, and how it would be politically advantageous to marry the hostile chief’s daughter, and bring peace to the English settlement.

My associates at Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College in Hayward, Wisconsin, have only two kinds of memories of Pocahontas. She saved the life of Captain John Smith from beheading, and then married him; or she was a saintly, kind, warm wonderful Indian princess.

In 1995, we’re far more educated now as a society. We’re more tolerant of cultural differences. We strive for multicultural representation in the workplace. Surely, the junior high school history books must depict our new found values and more depth about Pocahontas.

“Bring you history book home tomorrow. I want to look at something in there,” I tell my fourteen-year-old son. He’s in junior high school.

“Okay,” he responds.

His textbook, published in the 1980s, is about world history. I flip through the index for information on American Indians. None. I look for native American citations. None. I look for Aborigines. None. I look up Pocahontas. There it is on page 638.  I flip through the pages looking for Pocahontas.

There she is with her creamy angelic face wearing her long, flowing gowns and standing next to a white man. Her head is tilted to one side and her hands are raised prayer-like toward the bearded Shakespearean-looking white man.

I wonder what the textbook says about her. I look for the chapter heading and read all about Captain John Smith and how he heroically saved the whole English colony by himself. And the colony becomes self-sufficient and world-renowned with its tobacco plantation.

Nothing has changed in our school text books after 24 years. There are the same number of pages, three, to be exact, and not one word about Pocahontas except for her name written under her image.

Today I wonder if Pocahontas was a sell out or whether she was a neglected and angry daughter with few choices to make. Whatever the circumstances were in her life, she fulfills the American imagination and their wish for an Indian princess who loves and accepts them all.

Sherrole Benton teaches at Lac Courte Oreilles Community College and is public relations specialist for the tribe.