Pocahontas Perplex

The tendency to hold up Pocahontas as a role model, often as a way to excuse European colonisation of the Americas, and the fact that Pocahontas herself is often idealised in the media that as a symbol she’s become what Native American women ought to be. Exotic but appealing to Western men, complacent with Western colonisation. The ideal that Native American women will always be perplexed by, since they’re negatively affected by this in many ways. This can manifest itself as sexual assault, not helped by both sexualised portrayals and that they’re treated more as an outfit to wear rather than actual people with feelings and cultures. It can be said that in this regard, Native Americans and their ilk tend to be rather dehumanised.

Almost to the point where they’re treated as if they’re nonexistent, even when they do which explains why cultural appropriation happens so often. People who don’t come from communities with totem animals believe they can get a spirit animal anytime they want, regardless of that in some societies with an actual totem animal it’s passed down from parent to child. Though this is an African example, it’s still telling that you’d have to be born into a certain family to get a totem animal like they do in Akan communities. You’d have to be born into that family to get the spirit animal, which makes you wonder if any attempts at claiming a spirit animal for oneself feels like they’re stealing a family heirloom or something.

The fact that Native Americans are often treated as nonexistent has really harmful implications for who they are as people, this means Pocahontas has taken on mythical proportions that wouldn’t be done to a white historical figure like Dolly Madison. It wouldn’t even be done to a more recent character like JonBenet Ramsay, whom Pocahontas is compared to. Pocahontas was between 10 and 12 when she met John Smith, but was in her mid-to-late teens when she married Kocoum whom she mothered a son to. She had some good qualities before, but let’s not forget that she was terribly dehumanised by the time she got to England due to being so different from the English populace. She was treated as less than the person she was back home.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to gloss over the trauma she experienced upon going to England, if because so many indigenous women are made missing in North America. So many of them get raped and killed, that it’s not a good idea to honour her legacy by idealising her in a way her life wasn’t. Her life wasn’t rosy, especially later on. She could’ve been a role model, but she’s more of an example of squandered potential as her life wasn’t just cut short but also marred by brutality. She’s a harrowing reminder of the pain and trauma indigenous women go through in a colonised world, in fact she’s rightfully regarded as the first murdered, missing indigenous woman. She can be remembered, but not in a way that idealises her as much as white people do.

It’s a quite shame that she’s held up so high for seemingly permitting European colonisation of the Americas, not that she should be demonised but she’s more of a tragic example than a congratulatory one.

Discolouration of the wind

Pocahontas, as she was known to Mattaponi oral historians, was a preteen when she first met John Smith. She did get older but she never fell in love with him, she got married to Kocoum first and then to Thomas Rolfe though with the attempt to assimilate her into English society. If you believe them, she could’ve been raped or generally treated worse than she was used to when she was with the Powhatan community. If because she wasn’t white, it would’ve been easy for 17th century Britons to dehumanise her. Certainly life with the Powhatan wasn’t any better either, but she was treated better there than in England where if Sarah Baartman was any indication being nonwhite she would’ve been treated as a curiosity throughout the rest of her life.

Disney, at some point, when portraying Pocahontas at life attempted to tell a story that was closer to fact but deliberately gave up when they realised she’d be more interesting if she was idealised in a way she wasn’t. They bought into false stories about her falling in love with John Smith, even though in reality she hadn’t and if she did have a crush on him it would never be reciprocated. The idealisation and objectification of Pocahontas has badly affected Native American and First Nations women that it does contribute to the Murdered, Missing Indigenous Women phenomenon not helped by that Pocahontas herself is the first MMIW in history. Perhaps rightfully so as she was taken away from her people in her mid-teens.

In hindsight, in light of the growing awareness of MMIW, Disney’s Pocahontas has left a very dark legacy since it happened in recent memory. According to one Redditor, Disney’s Pocahontas may’ve influenced people for the worse when it comes to surviving victims being compared to her or rather the idealised version of her. It’s also not much of a stretch to say that while degrading portrayals of indigenous women did exist before, Disney’s Pocahontas has led to a more blatant sexualisation of not only the namesake historical figure (as evidenced by the 2005 New World film, one picture and also Conan’s version of her) but also one female character’s appearance in The Road to El Dorado.

Because the Pocahontas film was so popular that it would’ve influenced how those growing up in the 1990s and 2000s see Native American women as, there were people idealising Pocahontas before but the film pretty much directly led to not only The Road to El Dorado (in a way) but also more blatant sexualisation. This has led to a counterpoint in the form of Missing Matoaka (Pocahontas’s second name after Amounte). I still think whoever you believe, Pocahontas was likely treated as a curiosity more than as a person since she’s not white and was in England when she got abducted or something. The sort of attention she received would’ve hurt her a lot, since she wasn’t treated like a person the way she was at home.

Even today, due to stereotypes and idealisations, Native Americans and Native American women in particular aren’t treated like people. This kind of othering dehumanises them, as it would with other marginalised demographics even if they aren’t always alike. The fact that Pocahontas is now better remembered as a fictional character sort of tars her status as not just a historical figure, but also one of the earliest MMIW around.

They shouldn’t have done this

When it comes to Disney’s Pocahontas, it was going to be more historically accurate well in a way where Pocahontas was going to be a preteen girl. Unfortunately, she had to be aged up to her twenties to make it into a romance between her and John Smith. It’s not that she didn’t get any older in real life, but her actual life story’s a tragedy in that she got kidnapped, raped and then died possibly from poisoning if you believe Mattaponi sources.

The fact that indigenous American women are often kidnapped and murdered at higher rates makes the real life Pocahontas not only the first missing, murdered indigenous woman but also how much more harmful her fictional counterpart is and gets. This not only contributes to more MMIW (and anybody who’s survived rape say that they get compared to Pocahontas a lot), but also alongside fancy dress more stereotypes about indigenous women.

That’s being submissive to white men, sexually/romantically available and primitive not to mention only a fraction of how diverse indigenous cultures are and can get, so I do think cultural appropriation is problematic in the sense of reinforcing stereotypes about ethnic groups. Not only untrue but also a fraction of what they really are. This is how problematic the legacy of Disney’s Pocahontas is and gets, disregarding sad facts for a happy fantasy.

They can eagerly appropriate aspects of indigenous cultures, but not love or at least respect indigenous people as people. That’s what makes cultural appropriation and stereotypes problematic for any ethnic group, but especially indigenous people in this post. Pocahontas shouldn’t have been made, or should’ve been made truer to what Pocahontas was as a real person.

What she has gone through should not be sugarcoated, there’s no hiding what Native women go through and now Disney really has to apologise to indigenous women due to the harm it’s caused.

Who’s part of your world?

Lately, there’s anger over the live action adaptation of Disney’s Little Mermaid with a black actress playing the part of Ariel. While the trailer just features her singing and with dyed red hair to boot, most of the comments were spammy in nature as if to mock the film because she’s played by a black woman. While I did find it shocking, it’s unfortunate that out of all the live action remakes this got bashed the hardest. While there are people who say that Ariel can’t be black because she has red hair, they forget that black people can have natural red hair if this is proof.

It’s like how the cartoonist John Byrne said that Jessica Alba shouldn’t play Invisible Woman because she looks like a hooker, even though she did her homework when playing the part at all. While complaints about race are understandable at first, it seemed they can’t stop being racist whenever a Latina or black woman dyes her hair to play the part. Geek culture and especially western geek fandoms are very anti-black, so anti-black they bash them a lot.

(Admittedly, I was like this at one point and I stopped.)

The fact that there are little black girls who identified with this Ariel makes you wonder if it’s a form of misogynoir, especially when some of these detractors complain about her being ugly and black now. They complain about how dark-skinned these Ariel is, even though animals like orcas have dark skin and live in the sea themselves. It seems their complaints are a form of misogynoir, they say mermaids can’t be dark-skinned but never complain much if a white blonde’s made into a white brunette.

Well not to the same extent it does for blacks, which says a lot about their double standards. Somebody on Tumblr said that in the West whites are so well-represented that they’re naturally assumed to be default, to the point where some fans of colour racebend existing characters to provide representation. It also gets worse if the existing characters of colour are either stereotypes, inauthentic or too obscure to gain much attention the same way a better known white character does.

I even admit to racebending other characters before, like say imagining Arrow’s Felicity Smoak to be a timid Anglo-Indian seamstress or Doom Patrol’s Valentina Vostok as a Yakut. Bear in mind that people of colour do exist in Russia, not just as immigrants and scions of immigrants but also indigenous people such as the Yakuts and Buryats. These kinds of people need more representation, not just on the local level but also on an international scale.

There’s one Cameroonian cartoonist who identified with Ariel before she got racebent, but with a new black Ariel where black girls identify with her a lot it becomes even more necessary to diversify. Sadly, some of the worst perpetuators of misogynoir are black men. So much so they relentless bash black women for being in relationships with white men, black women for speaking out against ills and black women for being into the ‘wrong’ kinds of black men.

Seems like whatever black women and girls like would be shot down in flames, not only by nonblacks but also by black men (as I know from experience). There are even black men who complain about how the movie would involve swirling/interracial relationships if the prince is white, but the fact that they desire white women a lot should make it fair for black women to do the same.

I think if DC ever did something similar to Felicity Smoak, the backlash wouldn’t just come from racist men but also racist white women who feel the Felicity Smoak they know is gone and replaced by a shy Desi seamstress. It gets weirder still when you realise that Black Canary in the Birds of Prey still sports blonde hair and Titans’ Starfire has red hair but not a single complaint’s aimed at Felicity Smoak’s representation on Arrow.

Even though she wasn’t a bespectacled blonde in the original comics, so if Felicity Smoak were to become a dark-haired not bespectacled Indian seamstress it would be closer to her original presentation. This Ariel still sports red hair, though duller than it is in animation but still. Complaints over characters’ appearances don’t change much even though they retain their original hair colour once they got racebent.

Admittedly, making Valentina Vostok Yakut would be a radical departure not just in terms of appearance but the fact that outside of Russian media there’s not a single Russian of colour in fiction. Even though they make appearances in nonfiction texts like Farley Mowat’s The Siberians, then again not a lot complained about her having darker hair in live action despite being a blonde in the comics.

I honestly think racebending existing characters gives an advantage, especially if otherwise original characters of colour aren’t just obscure but also whitewashed. In the case with Teen Titans’s Jinx, she is Indian in the comics but upon appearing in the televised adaptation she got whitewashed. If Felicity Smoak ever become Anglo-Indian, she’d be DC’s most prominent Indian character in a way Jinx didn’t get to be.

Likewise with Ariel, according to those who’ve watched the film The Princess and the Frog’s that although Disney did have an original black princess in Tiana she spent a lot of time as a frog that having Ariel be played by a black woman makes her Disney’s most prominent black princess. Just by going this logic alone. As what somebody else said, the original depiction of Ariel won’t go away if the live action remake has a black lead.

Arrow’s take on Felicity Smoak won’t go away if DC Comics and subsequent portrayals make her Indian, though I’d say these fans have to share characters with those who want to see themselves represented. Representation becomes even trickier if other portrayals tend to be so stereotypical that explains and deconstructs why many indigenous women have issues with Disney’s Pocahontas.

Pocahontas is not good indigenous representation because she not only distorts her real life counterpart’s life and history but also perpetuates stereotypes about indigenous women and their plight, having Ariel be played by a black woman provides representation for young black girls. It’s also not the first time she was played by a woman of colour, she was portrayed by a Hawaiian before.

The fact that white people are the default in most popular media means they get represented more often and less stereotypically (well in general) than nonwhite ethnicities do, it’s only fair that people of colour get represented more often well outside of local media for a change.

That’s a bad portrayal

For a story that’s about championing the oppressed, X-Men does suck when it comes to portraying those who are from ethnic minorities. Even when restricted to white people, I don’t think X-Men have ever portrayed the plight and joys of somebody who speaks in a minority language such as Basque or Skolt Sami. Those who speak in minority languages have faced discrimination and pressure to give up on those, the better to assimilate I suppose.

Lately, there’s some furore over the way Dani Moonstar is portrayed over the years. For those who don’t know, Dani Moonstar is a mutant with the ability to create illusions and a good marksman herself. There’s this one portrayal of her that makes her look like Disney’s Pocahontas, itself not a good representation of indigenous women. Especially when it not only distorts actual history and events, but also because it plays into stereotypes about indigenous women.

The stereotype being that they’re sexually available for white and non-indigenous men, they are exotic but this portrayal dehumanises them and puts them at increased rate of abuse (including rape and kidnapping). Those who survived rape and any other form of abuse say they’ve been compared to Pocahontas before, perhaps made ironic by the fact that if we believe the Mattaponi she was also raped and kidnapped.

This makes Disney’s Pocahontas and other portrayals (to some extent) all the more problematic as they promote a idealised distortion of what indigenous women are actually like, these portrayals along with cultural appropriation contribute to the abuse of indigenous women. Dani Moonstar’s not the only one who’s fallen into a racist portrayal at some point, so has Gen13’s Sarah Rainmaker. Gen13 being another young superhero team, but where Sarah Rainmaker has fallen into bad stereotypes.

Both as a sexualised indigenous woman and an idealised portrayal of what lesbians are like, especially as time passed where she became more conventionally feminine looking. Not that feminine looking lesbians don’t exist, but even then the way their love lives are like are nothing like the ones in porn. It may be getting better these days, but if the fury over Marvel’s King Conan is any indication once somebody falls into an anti-indigenous portrayal it offends them a lot.

Especially if somebody like Matoaka was abused in her lifetime.

Who was the real Pocahontas?

To a certain generation, their introduction to Pocahontas was through a Disney film and this is where she is remembered as. More a fictional princess than an actual person, who wasn’t even made into an aristocratic peer when she arrived in England. To my knowledge, while hunter-gatherer communities (such as those in parts of North America) did have leaders there wasn’t much of an idea of a landowning rulership that defines those from agricultural communities.

Rulers as we expect them to be were likelier to be found among Mexican Nahuatls than among Virginian Powhatans, the tribe which Pocahontas belonged to. Admittedly, my knowledge of the various Native American tribes and communities in North America isn’t that deep but some don’t really have a concept of a landowning rulership the way the Chinese, the Mexicans and Cameroonian Bamilekes do. This means Pocahontas wasn’t the daughter of a king, only the daughter of a prominent community leader.

Now with the Bamilekes, they really do have kingdoms and kings so they really do have a concept of a landowning rulership the way the Powhatans didn’t. But for some reason, Disney never went with that even if it’s something that exists among some African communities and countries. Not to mention, there’s the tendency to portray Pocahontas as older when she first met John Smith even though she would’ve been younger, perhaps much younger in reality.

I do think there’s an unfortunate tendency to see and treat black and brown children as older than they really are, even if they’re innocent children they’re seen as the opposite. This likely plays into how Pocahontas is portrayed in fiction, even if she could’ve been an early teenager (at the very least) who simply observed John Smith making his way she’s made into his lover and rescuer in a way she wasn’t in real life. Actually if you believe oral accounts, she was even married to Kocoum and had a child with him.

This means her child with Thomas Rolfe is the second child she had and the first child she had with another man, another man whom she didn’t consent marrying to unlike with Kocoum. That’s if he’s the first person she married to and arguably fell in love with first too. There are also oral accounts of her being raped by English settlers, that if it were true she could’ve been one of the earliest missing indigenous women around. Possibly even the first.

Strangely enough, at some point Disney animators toyed with a Pocahontas who was closer to her historical counterpart. But this was ditched in favour of presented her as older than she really was when she first met John Smith, who was even presented as a lover and a person she rescued from her stern father. Ironically, it was really an innocent ceremony that was distorted into something darker. If true, then it’s a gross distortion of historical fact.

As well as adultifying Pocahontas in a way she wasn’t in real life, which again proves my point that there’s a tendency to treat brown and black children as older than they really are. There’s a tendency to sexualise and objectify Pocahontas, even by other women of colour (as with Nicki Minaj) that unfortunately contributes to the amount of rape indigenous women have been subjected to. In America (and possibly North America in general, though I could be wrong about it), indigenous women are more likely to be raped than other women.

Indigenous women have been dehumanised, whether through cultural appropriation (that’s co-opting aspects of a culture without respecting the people behind it), objectification or stereotypes. This means people are more likely to disregard and disrespect these people, treating them as objects rather than actual people. Pocahontas, to put it this was, has been romanticised and idealised for so long that it not only objectifies her but also her people.

It’s like if Disney put out a movie where Anne Frank is not only older but also falls in love with a Nazi soldier, it would be real bad taste to everybody who’s Jewish so why keep on doing that to Native Americans? Jews don’t make up a big portion of the American population but they’re more likely to be treated respectfully than with Native Americans, so such an argument would be rather flawed.

In fact, Jews are even better represented than Native Americans are. Even if Native Americans came first, they’re often stereotyped, appropriated, demonised and romanticised but never with respect and actual admiration for them as a people. If this is the legacy Pocahontas left via the arts and entertainment, then it ought to be dismantled to pay better homage to her people.

Indigenous misrepresentations

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.

The truth about Pocahontas

When it comes to most portrayals of Pocahontas in the media, she’s been portrayed contrary to who she actually was in history and official records. Pocahontas’s often depicted as an adult upon meeting John Smith, as evidenced in the Peggy Lee song ‘Fever’ whereas in real life she was a preteen or early teenager at the time. In terms of modern American laws, she would’ve been too young to drink (legal drinking age is 21) and too young to have sex with (18 in most states, 17 in Texas and possibly a few others). If we hold up a 12 year old Pocahontas by contemporary British law, the problem would be the same as the legal age of sexual consent is 16 and the legal drinking age is 18.

She did grow into adulthood but that was when she ended up with another man altogether and even then it wasn’t that romantic, especially when she died of an illness. There’s a tendency to romanticise the story between John Smith and Pocahontas even though in reality Pocahontas never fell in love with him, the only man she ended up having eyes for was John Rolfe. Among Native Americans, the subject of Pocahontas is contentious as she has been objectified and romanticised by many white people. If you believe them, Pocahontas deserves better than being objectified and romanticised in the media and in clothing where those fancy dresses are marketed as Pocahontas ones.

But I do think the ageing up of Pocahontas upon meeting John Smith is terrible, especially when she would’ve been legally and practically a minor upon meeting Smith that ageing her up does set up for terrible sexualisation and idealisation. She may’ve meet John Smith but she never fell in love with him, she married Koucoum first and then John Rolfe. She never saved John Smith from her father, that never really happened which would’ve been a fabrication along with ageing her up in that story. She may have descendants but she never dated John Smith nor did she save his life from her father. She would’ve been a minor at the time of the meeting and even then she never had a crush on him either.