When it comes to Pocahontas, she’s commonly (mis)represented as being in love with John Smith even though in reality that wouldn’t have happened even if she were older and she was married to Kocoum with a child even. Not to mention she was younger than traditionally presented as, which makes one wonder if some people see black people as less infantilised and more sexualised than white people are would some of the same things be said about Native Americans who are also subjected to this?
It’s like if somebody made a movie about Anne Frank falling in love with somebody despite being a victim of the Holocaust, a lot of Jews will find this disrespectful to her memory and the fact that she got killed and never fell in love with her captors. That’s the situation Pocahontas is in, and it is damning why the Disney animators knew she was really a young girl at the time decided to reimagine her as an adult falling in love with a man she never was infatuated with in reality.
Likewise there’s a tendency to misrepresent indigenous folk beliefs, usually as something to be appropriated by white people regardless of the intense importance it has to some indigenous people and that not all indigenous people as necessarily this spiritual. The 1990s programme The Sentinel is one example of this phenomenon that not only has a white character appropriate the beliefs of an indigenous group but also misrepresents what indigenous Amazonians believe in.
There’s also a tendency to treat indigenous people as homogeneous (which’s also the same for Africans and Asians to varying degrees), for instance not all Native Americans highly esteem dogs. It could be personal opinion and experience, but it could also be a cultural phenomenon as with the Guaja foragers where they value monkeys over dogs a lot. Likewise, the Navajo people greatly fear wolves and coyotes as they associate them with witchcraft though not all Native American tribes share this sentiment.
When it comes to indigenous misrepresentations, it could be ignorance but also a possible ingrained stereotypical expectation that even if they’ve met and encountered Native Americans they still have stereotypical expectations of them. I do know somebody who despite being meeting and observing black people had stereotypes of them, so this might be a barrier to overcoming stereotypes about Native Americans and anybody else in general.
If there are blacks who object this to stereotypes about them in bed (this is true for any gay black man, I observed this online), there are Native Americans who object to similar things as well. They’re not necessarily promiscuous, easy or seductive despite not always being pure and clean themselves. (Actually this other Native American I know doesn’t do a lot of porny fan art as far as I know about it.) It’s not just enough to observe them, but to be this close to them to know what they object to and why they do this.
That’s necessary for not only getting over racist stereotypes, but also to understanding them as a people and to stop misrepresenting them and anybody else at all.
fynm 