Pocahontas

1
Pocahontas

• Story Convention
• Clash of cultures
• Coming of age romance
• Spunky hero/heroine
• Edgertons analysis

2
Image Power

• Re-telling history
• Shaping images
• Disney version becomes the
  definitive version

3
Global Supertext

• Pochontas as supertext
• 80 million investment 1 billion revenues
• Burger King
• Payless Shoes
• Mattel
• Trailer on Lion King tapes (50 million)

4
Blurred Message

• Algonquin advice rejected
• More positive images sentimental
• Vague environmental themes
• You think you own whatever land you land on,
• The earth is just a dead thing you can claim
• But I know every rock and tree and creature

5
Blurred Message

• Fictional love story
• Race, environmentalism, religion downplayed
• wrapped in nostalgic fantasy
• Flip-flop of traditional hero villain roles
• Easy scapegoating of dominance

6
History of the Other?
7
Other History

• One of the happiest times in the struggle to
  maintain the little Colony was during the Peace
  of Pocahontas. When John Rolfe
• married the young Indian Princess, daughter of
  the powerful Emperor Powhatan, the colonists
  enjoyed a peace with the
• Indians unequaled before her marriage with Rolfe
  or after her tragic, early death at Land's End,
  England, where she was
• buried in the Churchyard. Numerous of her
  descendants are members of the Jamestowne
  Society. And through their
• memberships we remember Princess Pocahontas'
  immense contribution to Jamestowne. Without the
  Peace of Pocahontas,
• that short interval of time may well have been
  spent upon disastrous warfare instead of the
  building of the settlement that
• would begin the Nation.

8
Remaking Pocahontas
9
The White Mans Indian?

• Social construction of beauty standards and race
• Indians look and sound like whites
• Pocahontas aerobicized, Native American
  superbabe

10
The finest creature the human race has to
offer
11
History Lessons

• Pocahontas seen as peace offering to Algonquin
  protest of Disney America
• Visits to Jamestown up 60 percent