Blog Post 12: Pocahontas: Did Disney Do it Right?

Well I have to say that when we watched Pocahontas in class the other day; I could see how that film could be shown in a classroom for educational purposes. BUT after further research, I have to say that almost this entire movie is totally inaccurate. The reason for this rant is because following the viewing of the film I did research and the movie does not ad up to the real history and also the depiction of the Native Powhatan tribe was completely botched. When I looked up the real history of Pocahontas I was surprised to see that her name was not even Pocahontas and also she was in fact married to Kocoum. In the movie she is about to marry Kocoum, but ends up falling for Smith. But in real life, she was married to Kocoum when she was in her teens and when Smith arrived she was around 10 or 11. This is interesting due to the fact that most of the Disney princess movies including Pocahontas make all of the princesses look like they are older that way they don’t send a message to kids. This is understandable, but still needs to be taken into consideration when making a history movie. Also there is another thing that is interesting about this film. Due to the fact that we all think that she is going to run off with John Smith. Well this obviously is completely messed up it isn’t John Smith that she ends up with. She ends up getting captured and gets taken back to England and was converted to Christianity. Following this, she ends up marrying John Rolfe who was known for his introduction of tobacco to the settlements. The last thing that in my mind at least I found to be a little offensive was the way the Powhatan Indians were depicted. There was a discussion in class that brought it to my attention that the image of the Native Americans in the movie looked more like the Mohawk tribe rather than the Powhatan. In a way I feel like this is a little offensive due to the fact that I am half Native American and I know quite a bit about my own heritage based on research that I have done. I feel like that there could have been more research done on the different tribes in order to have a more authentic feel to the movie. In my opinion I think that this is one movie that could be redone just because of all of the things that were done wrong. But that is just my opinion. I had only watched this movie one other time aside from class and even then I had mixed feelings about the movie, and after seeing it a second time I can safely say that it is definitely my least favorite.