Princess Pocahontas

This paper will examine the recent Disney animated film Pocahontas from the perspective of its use of actual history and folklore. The process of transforming historic/folkloric materials into a form acceptable to a mass audience will be critically examined, along with public reactions to the film from various communities (Native American, children's literature professionals, general public).

Benjamin Balak and Charlotte Trinquet du Lys (ed.), Creation, Re-creation, and Entertainment: Early Modernity and Postmodernity. Tubingen: Biblio 17, 2019, 351-369., 2019

The eastward crossing of the Atlantic by Native Americans during the early modern period remains an understudied topic in the history of European imperialism. This overlooked phenomenon is all the more surprising since “these Americans were the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ most persistent and accessible wonders .” Besides becoming “instant celebrities” who attracted huge crowds, these exotic visitors facilitated peace alliances and contributed to capturing investors’ interests in Northern American settlements . Furthermore, the meticulous staging of their visit by European governments served to showcase successful colonial policies. Depending on how well they served expansionist goals, these visiting Indians were celebrated and remembered very differently. In this article, I compare the contrasting legacies of two Native American princesses who sojourned in Europe at that time: the Powhatan princess Pocahontas, who stayed in London in 1616, and the Missouri princess, Ignou Ouaconisen, who visited Paris in 1725. Despite many similarities between their stories and purpose of their European sojourns, these two Native American princesses diversely impacted the collective imagination. Since the 17th-century, the legend of Pocahontas has largely been used to legitimize British imperialism and, later, to ease American white supremacist consciousness. I argue that the seemingly innocent Disney direct-to-video sequel, Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World (1998), participates in this tradition and communicates a dangerously simplified representation of “otherness,” conveying a message of English culture’s superiority. However, the factual and fictional documents accounting for the visit of Ignou Ouaconisen reveal a more complex relationship between 18th-century French and Native Americans. In this article, I contend that the comparison between a 20th-century American fairytale on film and an 18th-century French chronicle – through different means of relating historical facts – uncovers enduring stereotypical representations of Native American women and imperialistic (colonial and postcolonial) issues at stake.

Medieval Feminist Forum, 1993

When visiting the Jamestown settlement, I saw a young boy of about eight, fair haired and blue eyed, who with his parents was looking at the statue of Pocahontas, a pleasant bronze of a girl that marks the entrance into the museum. The boy said, "Dirty Indian" and spat at the statue. The parents said nothing in reprimand or comment. I was startled by the suddenness of his hostility as well as by their silence. That moment crystallized a long curiosity I had had about the interactions between the earliest English settlers, the native inhabitants, and the formation of our present codes. My decision to write about Pocahontas was formed after several years of teaching both Renaissance drama and "Introduction to Women's Studies," a course which emphasizes a recognition of the grids of race and class that intertwine in the construction of gender. To examine the construction of mce in the early seventeenth century, I decided to try to reconstruct the perspective of Pocahontas, an outsider, albeit a highly privileged one, who actually saw English society herself. Traditional lore about Pocahontas centers on her rescue of an English colonist, John Smith, when he was about to be killed by her father's warriors. This is often represented as a romance narrative, and it is frequently erroneously assumed that at her subsequent marriage to an Englishman, she married John Smith, not John Rolfe. She visited England, as a demonstration of Virginia Company success, and died at Gravesend on her return to America. The core of this story can be found in three major sources: John Rolfe's letter justifying his marriage to an Indian woman, Ralph Hamor's description of her kidnapping and conversion (1615), and most extensively in John Smith's A True Relation (1608), and his much later Generall Historie of Virginia (1624). English observers in London, John Chamberlain, and Samuel Purchas, a popularizer of narratives of voyage and colonization, also describe her briefly. The curious fact, recorded in John Chamberlain's letter to Dudley Carleton, that Pocahontas on her visit to England had attended a masque at court before returning to Virginia offered me an intriguing conjunction of a native American woman in the audience of a dramatic performance. Here are some of the problems I found in considering that odd conjunction. First I had to remove the accretions of romance that have encrusted the story. Then I had to evaluate the narratives written by Englishmen for evidence of their attitudes toward women and American Indians. While I could not recover direct evidence of Pocahontas's reaction to the English, I found textual and visual moments that suggest the challenge that she made to European discursive systems. In what I would call a process of feminist archaeology (Deborah Rubin's term), I moved from more traditional activities of literary history-analysis of Ben Jonson's masque and colonial narratives-to the feminist application of the perspective of gender to the historical study of literacy-a task that

2017

The story of European colonization in North America looms large in modern American cultural legend and imagination. The image of the pilgrims on the Mayflower, the first Thanksgiving, and the Jamestown colony are important parts of American foundation mythology. The story of Pocahontas is among those national legends, its retelling an integral part of a canon which seeks to tell the early story of the relationship between the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Europeans who would colonize their lands. Like most national histories, kernels of truth intermingle with legend to create a mythological and idealized past. In this, portrayals of the life of Pocahontas have shifted over time, but throughout have essentialized her and her people, presenting more often the values of the writer and artist, than the woman they claim to represent.

2019

Pocahontas is a figure with much cultural capital, even today, and her influence was historically important to Native and European agendas alike. Pocahontas as a person indeed had a life that seemed to influence political relations between Native and European (specifically Powhatan, specifically English). However, the storied construct of Pocahontas has had significantly more cultural sway, influencing (or at least representing changes in) everything from gendered power dynamics to the interplay between the European Colonizer and the Indigenous Other.1 Pocahontas’ image has been re-appropriated over and over throughout time to further political agendas and to represent the female and the Other. To this end, Pocahontas has been variously represented as the innocent, the “little wanton” rebel, the oppressed Native woman, the erotic exotic, the empowered political powerhouse and combinations of all of these archetypes. To focus this project, I will analyze four plays in the first half ...

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2002

What do we know about Pocahontas? We know that she was Powhatan's daughter, and in 1609 he was the principal leader of his people; and that Powhatan's two brothers and a sister, her uncles and aunt, were the leaders in three of the towns nearby, and that when Powhatan died, his brothers, not his children, governed in his place. We will never know if, like Powhatan's sister, Pocahontas would one day have ruled a town and become a powerful leader among her people because, as a teenager, she was kidnapped by the British, converted to Christianity, married to John Rolfe, taken to England where she died at the age of twenty-one, and was buried in St. George's Church in Gravesend. The British called her princess, but that is because the British thought Powhatan, because he was the principal leader in his country, must be a king. They didn't speak enough of the local Algonquian language to pick up on the subtleties of the political system of the indigenous people they met, and so they guessed at things and what they saw was shaped by their own cultural expectations of "pagan" society. Reading the documents the colonizers wrote is a revelation of what prejudices they held. The stereotypes are that old, and they grow. We know that the colonists were shocked that the people around Chesapeake Bay wore little clothing, and, in particular, they thought the women wanton. Three different historians tell us that the British translated the name Pocahontas to mean "little wanton," and they all comment on how most Powhatan women had naked breasts and that before puberty young girls went naked. They give Pocahontas's real name as Mataoka, and none tells us what it means. In his early writings from the period, John Smith mentions that Pocahontas brought food to trade for English goods, and that her generosity saved the colonizers from starvation. But not until 1624, after she was dead, did he write the Generall Historie of Virginia in which he talked about how she saved his life. Before she died, no one told that story, and after Smith wrote of it only two of that first group of colonists, neither of whom were present at the place where

IJCIRAS, 2018

Popular culture or pop culture gained ground around the 19 th century after the Second World War, with the word 'pop' being derived from pop music. The rise of the popular culture had been attributed to the middle class and was informed by the increasing advancement and innovations in mass media and technology. This brought about social and cultural changes in the society. Popular culture does not fall under any school of thought and it is difficult to define what pop culture is because it encompasses a wide array of genres where it seeps through starting from music to arts to literature to advertisements and so on. "In his book, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, John Storey offers six different definitions of popular culture. In one definition, Storey describes mass or popular culture as "a hopelessly commercial culture [that is] mass-produced for mass consumption [by] a mass of non-discriminating consumers." He further states that popular culture is "formulaic [and] manipulative," not unlike how he views the process of advertising. A product or brand has to be "sold" to an audience before it can be entrenched in mass or popular culture; by bombarding society with it, it then finds its place in popular culture." Therefore, a revered shoe painting by Van Gogh (A Pair of Shoes), epitomising a man's struggle in life can be turned into something called "Diamond Dust Shoes", produced solely for public consumption. Popular culture is the culture of the masses and is readily available to all, unlike high culture which remains reserved solely for the elite classes. Critics have often dismissed it to be trivial, repetitive, lacking in originality and have criticised it on several grounds. One of the primary reasons why popular culture is problematic is because it discourages us to question what we see and believe and accept in our lives because what the masses or the society at a given point in time believes in, automatically gets accepted without an individual wanting it. He/She finds himself or herself to be a part of it almost subconsciously. This wide acceptance of anything and everything informs our thoughts and shapes the way we think. This paper would therefore take a look at a children's movie called Pocahontas and try to unearth certain postcolonial aspects embedded in the movie. By doing so, the paper would establish the fact that the intermingling of popular culture with children's texts like movies or stories is even more problematic because everything gets accepted and no questions are raised, creating a superficial world for children.

Early American Literature, 2020

writing, together with the work's expansive scope and the substantial visual aids that buttress it, allow The World of the Crusades to stand out among the crowded field of scholarly overviews of the Crusades.

Children's Literature, 2015