Bedard graduated from A.J. Dimond High School in Anchorage, Alaska in 1985. Bedard attended The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where she studied Musical Theatre. In 2005, she was cast in the television mini-series Into the West as Margaret “Light Shines” Wheeler. In the 2017 music video for “Family Feud” (a song by Jay-Z), she plays a Co-President of the United States in the future.

Bedard married singer Denny Wilson in 1993. They have a son, Quinn Wilson, born in 2003. In November 2010, it was revealed that Wilson was sexually and physically abusing Bedard throughout their marriage, taking her earnings and forbidding her to work in her career field unless he specifically approved the project, according to her niece Alia Davis. The couple eventually divorced in 2012.

Bedard was born in Anchorage, Alaska, and is of Inuit and Cree ancestry. Her first role was as Mary Crow Dog in the 1994 television production, Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee, which depicted the 1970s standoff between the US government and citizens of several Native nations, including many of the Pine Ridge Reservation, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. She is probably best known as the voice of the eponymous heroine in the 1995 Disney animated film Pocahontas, the direct-to-video 1998 sequel Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World, and in the 2018 film Ralph Breaks the Internet. Bedard was also the physical model for the character. She appeared in a different take of the story in Terence Malick’s 2005 film The New World, as Pocahontas’s mother, Nonoma Winanuske Matatiske.

She was chosen in 1995 as one of People magazine’s ’50 Most Beautiful People’.