Yes, Virginia, This Pocahontas Is for Real

As for all the attention, she says, "I don't care about the attention." It matters only, she says, because "that gives you a bigger voice to try to bring about positive changes in the world."

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She was born in Germany, the daughter of a backpacking human-rights activist and a Peruvian artist. From Germany, the family made it to Hawaii, hopscotching from island to island, where her younger brother, Kainoa, was born. Sometimes Q'orianka's dad was part of the picture, sometimes not.

Her first languages were Quechua and Spanish. But her parents fought, often and bitterly. Early on, Q'orianka says, she came to associate those languages with strife and conflict.

"So I blocked it out," she says matter-of-factly, adding that she is estranged from her father. Now, she says, she "only" speaks English, German and Algonquian. The Algonquian she learned for the movie. The German she picked up because she wanted to eavesdrop on her mother and her grandmother.

During her early childhood in Hawaii, money was tight, so the family would hang out in the hotels, watching the entertainment. Q'orianka was mesmerized by the dancers and singers. Soon she was dancing and singing, too, studying all kinds of dance from ballet to Hawaiian to West African. She was 6 when she did her first street performance. By the time she was 9, she'd performed in more than 250 dance contests and local variety shows.

Just before her ninth birthday, the Kilchers landed in Los Angeles. "The last place I wanted to be was in L.A.," says her mother -- they were actually heading to Oklahoma so that Q'orianka could record a music demo, but their car broke down in Los Angeles. Saskia thought they'd be there a couple months at most, but her daughter was transfixed. Q'orianka's stage was Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, where she belted out songs in that big, bluesy voice of hers. (Her mother and the singer Jewel are first cousins.)

They saw a Rolling Stones concert, Saskia recalls, and her daughter told her, "Mom, I can see myself in that arena." So they struck the deal: Saskia would help with her career, so long as she used her talents to "empower her voice" and those of others.

Her mother hauled her around from audition to acting class in their beat-up car.

"My mom was so sweet, she would always do anything to get me to acting class," recalls Q'orianka. "She was always walking around very dirty because she was always under the car, being the mechanic. She was always under the car, all dirty and oily and stuff.

"And all the moms were making fun of her and stuff because we are, of course, different and they have their fancy cars and stuff and here we are under the car."

It was at one of those classes that her grease-smudged mother met Carlyne Grager , the woman who would become Q'orianka's agent. Her daughter was taking classes there, too, and the two women quickly bonded. Soon, she'd signed Q'orianka to her Seattle-based agency. Q'orianka was 10 at the time.