The movie Pocahontas came out in June of 1995, when I was about one and a half. I am told by my parents that I first watched the movie when I was six. They told me that I wanted to watch it because my school was putting on a play about the Native Americans and first Thanksgiving. I was probably really excited to see a Disney movie about something that I was learning in school (now I know that the movie Pocahontas is actually about the settling of Jamestown, not the first Thanksgiving). The movie is, after all, loosely based on the story of the real life Pocahontas, the daughter of famous Native American chief Powhatan. Since I was young and impressionable when I first watched the movie I inevitably took every single detail in that movie as 100% verifiable fact. I mean, why would Disney lie to me? When I first found out that Disney’s version of Pocahontas wasn’t completely accurate, I think a little part of my childhood was shattered. Since then, I have never been able to see the movie the same way. This was still true when I watched the movie most recently. I really wanted to like it, but I just couldn’t see it the same way as I did when I was younger. All I could think about was how none of the events portrayed in the movie happened the way Disney said they did. In a quest to try and recapture some of my shattered childhood I set out to do a little research on how much of the movie was actually true. Though I did find out that many Native American groups all over the country criticized Disney for the historical inaccuracy of the movie, I also found out (thanks to this website) that there is actually a lot of verifiable truth to the movie. Of course the whole story was massively sugar coated and there were some parts that were flat out untrue (Pocahontas definitely didn’t learn how to speak English in 30 seconds and she probably didn’t have talking willow tree for a grandmother), but hey it’s a Disney movie.
All historical inaccuracies aside, I noticed that the movie does do a pretty good job at trying to teach kids tolerance. In true Disney fashion the movie mainly does this through song. The song “Colors of the Wind” shows that, just because someone looks, thinks, or acts differently than what you are accustomed to, it doesn’t mean that they are any lesser of a person than you are. The angry chanting song “Savages” attempts to show the error of the ways of both the European settlers and the Native Americans for assuming that everyone who is different from them is a “savage.” I admire the attempt in this song but I do think it evenly distributes the accusations of prejudice amongst both the Native Americans and the European settlers, when the lion’s share of those accusations should rest on the European settlers.
One other thing I noticed in this movie was that Capitan John Smith and Pocahontas do not actually ever end up together. They clearly fall in love, but are separated when John suffers a gunshot wound to the hip at the end of the movie and has to return to England. When I saw John Smith sail away on that boat and leave Pocahontas behind I nearly lost my mind. This was a clear switch from normal Disney protocol; in all the Disney movies I have seen so far the dashing young hero ALWAYS gets the girl. Disney probably broke this sacred tradition in the name of preserving some of the historical accuracy of the movie. In real life, though Pocahontas and John Smith do meet and become “friends,” Pocahontas actually marries another Englishman named John Rolfe.
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