In the spring of 1830, twelve-year-old Charlotte Barnes watched her mother, the popular actress Mary Greenhill Barnes, perform the title role in Pocahontas, or The Settlers of Virginia at the Park Theatre in New York. The play by George Washington Custis had premiered in Philadelphia on 18 January, and proved a tremendous success, due to its patriotic tone, thrilling battle scenes, and, no doubt, a titillating dance performed by native women. Apparently Custis's play also left indelible mark on young Charlotte Barnes, because the future playwright and actress reintroduced the Pocahontas tale to audiences in Philadelphia nearly twenty years later. The Forest Princess, or Two Centuries Ago debuted at the Arch Street Theatre on 15 February 1848, and ran for two more nights. It was revived on 29 April and 3 May 1850, at the same theater, but the play never achieved the popularity its predecessor enjoyed. Nearly diametrically opposed to the earlier version, Barnes's play depicts Pocahontas as adept politician who strives for racial and gender equality, rather than a loyal supporter of colonial domination who severs all ties with her own people. According to Gary Richardson, The Forest Princess is an interesting exception to the many Indian plays of the era, because it minimizes the usual romance in favor of a carefully crafted retelling of the Pocahontas story noteworthy for its respectful treatment of Native Americans. (1) This essay will expand on Richardson's observation in order to argue that The Forest Princess clearly subverts popular Indian plays of the day by supplying Pocahontas with a voice, granting her political status, and allowing her to reject colonial domination. Written and performed in the wake of the Indian Removal Policy and the Seminole Wars, Barnes's play also challenges the brutal national agenda toward Indians that Custis's play seeks to reinforce. Examined together, the two plays reflect the dramatic conflict offstage as white Americans struggled to rationalize the continued displacement of Indians as a natural occurrence, rather than a practice tantamount to genocide. George Washington Custis, step-grandson of George Washington, wrote a number of nationalistic plays and is credited with starting the vogue for Indian drama, with Indian Prophecy (1828); however, Pocahontas, or The Settlers of Virginia was his most successful of that genre. (2) Written just as the Indian Removal Policy of 1830 was being implemented, the play champions innate white superiority through already converted Pocahontas, who rejects her own people in favor of the colonists. Focused on Smith's battles with Powhatan and the inevitably romantic rescue of John Smith by a young girl, Pocahontas played for unprecedented twelve nights upon opening in Philadelphia before it moved to the Park Theatre, where Charlotte Barnes no doubt watched her mother perform the lead. (3) It was revived several times including, most notably, in 1836 at the National Theatre in Washington D.C., just as a delegation from the Cherokee nation led by John Ross arrived in the nation's capitol to protest the tribe's removal from Georgia. Pointing out that the play staged the ultimate assimilationist Indian, Rosemarie Bank observes, One can hardly imagine a worse simultaneity than the Cherokee antiremoval cause ... and a revival of Custis's propacifist Indian drama. The coincidence of the two does not surprise, given the topicality of Indians in 1836, but the staging of this particular red-white cultural intersection tells several stories. (4) Of all the stories the play does tell, such as condoning the banishment of Indians, or championing white domination, Pocahontas studiously ignores the story of its title character. Little more than a mouthpiece for colonial usurpation, the Pocahontas played by Mary Greenhill Barnes bears little resemblance to the character her daughter would create and perform herself years later. In fact, Barnes's version seems a deliberate attempt to revise the earlier play, so that Pocahontas, her life, her accomplishments, even her death, receive respectful and comprehensive treatment. …