Pocahontas Was a Mistake, and Here's Why!

The 90s was a weird time for representation of Native American people.

Reel Injun (documentary on Netflix)

the 90s crop of movies

sympathetic? to the Native American plight

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Enter Pocahontas, which effectively ended that 90s era of 'Why can't we just all get along' colonialist Hollywood narratives.

it plays into basically every Native American stereotype that even by the 90s had reached parody levels.

Pocahontas is basically peak 90s neoliberalism.

The subject of the Disney Company and its portrayal of indigenous peoples in service of the Disney brand is massive.

Americans are kind of obsessed with this idea of blood quantums

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Pocahontas was aged up the historical figure into a sexy Barbie doll.

sexualized Pocahontas

white Americans are fed from birth: that things were a little tense at first,but ultimately the whites and the natives got along and everything's fine.

revolutionary

Native American women are twice the national average in reported rapes and sexual assault

the first time other than on Northern Exposure that a human face has been put on an Indian female.

Here is this young woman who is wiser than her father or any man in the village,and she causes peace to reign.

the legacy of Pocahontas is more complicated than thing good or thing bad.

cultural appropriation!

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the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of another culture.

Kal Ho Naa Ho

This movie takes place in New York


(this was filmed in Toronto).

most Americans have an experienced media that has American culture on the other end of cultural appropriation.

leads to a lot of false equivalencies

the real question people want the answer to is where the line is between positive examples of representation and harmful cultural appropriation,

that's the problem: there isn't really a line.

Moana

no matter how respectful or well researched, there is always going to be some level of appropriation.

We've had four more Disney features with indigenous protagonists since Pocahontas, two of which involved said protagonists turning into large mammals in order to learn a lesson.

The Emperor's New Groove

Brother Bear

So they used music that most people hadn't heard of that had nothing to do with the context of the film in order to make the scene sound more magical

Moana&Pocahonta are both narratively and in concept

Nani sing Aloha Oe

So the big lesson learned from Pocahontas was don't make these narratives about the characters relationships to white people with the Emperor's, New Groove, Brother Bear and Moana

Disney vacation

Mulan which took place in China, but aesthetically picked and chose a lot of elements from all over Asia: Korea, Japan, the gang's all here

Moana also avoids the sexually available submissive Polynesian woman stereotype

Disney hired what they called an oceanic brain trust.

It's still very much a white person's story.
No matter how much the story draws from the culture

the line between representation and cultural appropriation especially in animated movies can be so blurry

Ad-venture will always be trumped by the proverbial bottom line

the ambivalence of the criticism it received is telling. It tells us that Disney--and by extension all of us--has a long way to go

the thing that I think really separates Moana from Pocahontas

In Pocahontas, spirit grandma tells her that she's obligated to fix the mess that other people made, but in Moana Spirit grandma concedes that it wasn't fair for her to put that responsibility on a literal child.

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