Yes, Virginia, This Pocahontas Is for Real

'New World' Spotlights Plucky Native American Teen

She's running a little late (wardrobe malfunction) and she's limping a little bit from the day before yesterday when she fell down the stairs in a fit of excitement (more on that later), but she's still rocking her platforms (it helps her hurt foot, she says, to walk in heels), strolling very slowly into the National Museum of the American Indian, apologizing for her tardiness, chewing gum and smiling and shaking hands with the museum director.

And here comes her mom, bringing up the rear. With a video camera. Mom. But Mom is intent on capturing everything (for a documentary), all this newness , the movie premieres, the newspaper interviews, the museum visitors doing the whozzat double take. So, after a little sotto voce negotiating -- in German -- Q'orianka (Cor-ee-AHN-ka, which means "Golden Eagle" in Quechua) Kilcher, the 15-year-old star of Terrence Malick's "The New World," does her mother's bidding, and stands there, in the lobby where everybody can see her, holding up a copy of her very first magazine cover (the reason she went tumbling down the stairs), smiling for the camera while her younger brother and her publicist and her agent and her agent's son and a handful of passersby look on.

"I feel so conceited," Q'orianka moans, gripping the latest edition of the Indian museum's magazine.

All this attention takes considerable adjustment. After all, before her head shot was passed along to Malick's casting directors, Q'orianka's previous screen experience amounted to a brief stint on "Star Search" (she sings, too) and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it role in "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas." But adjusting is what Q'orianka, part Quechua-Huachipaeri Indian, part Swiss-Alaskan, will have to do. In Malick's much-acclaimed "New World" -- his fourth film in 32 years -- the home-schooled ninth-grader plays a sinuous Pocahontas to then-29-year-old Colin Farrell's grizzled John Smith. She even gets to kiss Farrell -- yes, her first kiss.

Already, she's getting big buzz: Newsweek proclaims her "the new face of female stardom" and enthuses, "The casting of the unknown 14-year-old Kilcher proves a masterstroke." Salon asserts: "Her performance has so much innate elegance that she practically sneaks off with the picture," while New York magazine dubs her role the year's "Breakout Performance: Sexpot." (The film opens in Washington on Friday and had its East Coast debut in Colonial Williamsburg last month.)

Intoxicating praise guaranteed to make a teenager's head expand. Or maybe not: Her artist-activist mother stands by her side, needle in hand, ready to burst any incipient swelling. Conceit isn't tolerated for long in the Kilcher household.

"Once she attempted to go a little Hollywood," Saskia Kilcher, 37, says, a light German accent betraying her European childhood, "and I said, ' No . I'm not here to help you have a six-wing mansion.'

"This is like a very thin line between magic and madness."

The key to navigating that line, mother and daughter have decided, is to inject a little social activism into the Hollywood proceedings. "Climb into the belly of the beast," Saskia says, "and change things from within." Be an actor with a cause.

Which is to say that while Q'orianka expressed a passing admiration for a Cadillac Escalade ("I said, 'Baby! No! You cannot!' ") she pulled up to the red carpet at the Los Angeles premiere of "The New World" in a hydrogen-fueled car and invited Indian tribal leaders to the big event. Last month she participated in a fundraiser for the Pawnee Nation Academy, a college in rural Oklahoma, where she, along with "New World" cast member Brian Frejo, are honorary spokespersons. (The school's tribal planner, Crystal Echo Hawk, says publicity surrounding Q'orianka's involvement has helped put the school on the map and double its enrollment.)

Instead of turning to Hollywood stylists to deck her out in Marc Jacobs and Stella McCartney, Kilcher designs her own clothes and jewelry, and is working toward getting her own fashion line, called Generation Q. Eventually, she'd like to contract with her less-fortunate cousins in Peru to do the work. Then there's her goal to create a music school in Peru (her father's native land), and a law school "so people over there can learn things to protect their lives and stuff." Maybe she'll go to college. If she has time.

"Those are my sights of my future," Q'orianka says.