Witness And Narrative: Pocahontas

Walt Disney’s film Pocahontas is not historically accurate, but there is value in creating cartoon interpretations of American history. As a child, cartoons are mostly important for your development, both physically and mentally. Fairy tales help children understand the complexity of life. These visions use various symbols to teach morals and cognitive skills. Walt’s film was based off the legends and folktales surrounding Pocahontas, it was not meant to be historical but to promote racial tolerance.

The True Story of Pocahontas, written by Dr. Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow and Angela L. Daniel “Silver Star”, is a nonfiction novel that tells the tale of Pocahontas and the encounters of her tribe with John Smith and other English colonists who come over from Europe in the early 1600’s. Chapter three depicts how Pocahontas was used as a peace symbol by her tribe when entering the fort of the English, and how she became a peace symbol overall to the Powhatan people. This chapter tells about how the Powhatan people played a very influential part in the lives of the English colonists, especially during their first winter. The Powhatan people were very welcoming, and seeing how unprepared the colonists were for the harsh winters; they greatly

For this research paper, I am providing you with the history of the Cherokee Indians. I have Cherokee Indian in my blood. My father’s family is fully Cherokee Indian. Both my Mother and my Father resided in North Carolina. Except on my Mother’s side, she isn’t any Native American of any kind. I am doing my research paper on the Cherokee Indians because it always perks my interest in hearing about my ancestors and what they did.

Meanwhile in the powhatan tribe in the new world Pocahontas daughter of chief powhatan dreads being wed to kocoum , a brave

As young children we are often misled to believe that the stories and movies we are exposed to are presumably based on factual history, but are in reality myths, keeping the truthful, important, and fair facts hidden. Amonute is an accurate example of learning the real events that occurred in a person’s life while the typical myth of Pocahontas saved an Englishmen from being killed by her father. In the beginning of the book we are briefly introduced to Pocahontas, the Powhatan people and the English colonists. As the book continues we follow Pocahontas when she is kidnapped, her married life, and her trip to London where she got sick because of foreign illnesses and died. Camilla Townsends “Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma” wants Pocahontas’ true story to unfold because she is worthy of respect for her bravery and sacrifice and because “everyone subverted her life to satisfy their own needs to believe that the Indians loved and admired them” (Townsend, pg. xi). I also believe that the author was trying to argue that even though the Englishmen believed that the Native Americans were uncivilized and lived like savages, that instead they were wise people.

Ever since white men came to the New World, they were never at peace with the native peoples. One of the first white men to come to North America was Sir Walter Raleigh, who took the Indians he met as slaves as early as 1584. In the years that followed, settlers forced the Native Americans further and further west. By the year 1850, there had been many attempts at peaceful negotiations and uprisings on both sides, but the government eventually decided that reservations were the only way to contain the Indians and have peace. These reservations took away their pride, freedom, and way of life. Native Americans in reservations today are still plagued by lack of food and shelter, health and

wasn't that big and nice. The land is actually in bad conditions when we got there and it still is now. The U.S. soldiers told us that this will be our new home and we had to stay here. If we left, then we might have been prosecuted and worst of all killed. They also said that this is a reservation and by law we had to stay here for now. I went toward the U.S. soldiers and ask, them what was a reservation? They said it was an area of land given by the government for Native Americans to occupy.My face was turning red, I was enraged because we were told to move away from our terrain and to adjust our lives to be on a reservation. We are humans, just like them, meaning we should be treated the same as them and not be set aside like if we something meaningless. In the reservations, we couldn't survive with these kinds of conditions because we need it to hunt buffaloes. buffaloes are our main source that provided almost everything needed to survive. Buffalo provided us with food, tools, weapons, and clothing. It wasn't possible for us to hunt buffalo in reservations because buffaloes, where it usually found in reservations or near reservations.Most Native Americans and I were crying because we lost our spirits a fight. We lost our spirit to fight because the United States troops and the government took our land that was rightly ours, most Native Americans died during the trails of tears. They made us move to a horrible place with the worst conditions that mankind could have imagined.The conditions of the houses on the reservation had the same conditions of a reservation overall. The houses in the reservations are tenements because the houses were poorly built. The ceilings of the houses were poorly built because it seemed that it was going to fall down in view of the fact that the rain made the ceiling fall apart. In the circumscribed land, there wasn’t a multitudinous quantity of stores. The stores

[1] Disney’s Pocahontas has understandably received a lot of flak about the historically inaccurate story that is told about the legendary Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. There is a good reason for that. The movie does little that can be construed as historically accurate, yet Disney claims that was never their intent. Disney, in their previous movies, has been attacked for being racist and unsympathetic to racial minorities. Their answer was a movie whose sole purpose, as stated by Disney, was to promote racial tolerance. The question is, then can a movie promote racial tolerance when the issue is built on false history, history that if told accurately would depict the exact opposite?

Despite the fact that the Intercourse Act was designed to keep settlers from occupying Indian land without a treaty, Americans did not heed this and began chasing off and even killing many Indians so as to take their land and no white jury would punish them for this. To add to the problem, settlers moved west ahead of the treaties and populated land that belonged to the Indians. The Indians were not willing to stand for this type of injustice and revolts broke out such as the battle between the Miamis, Little Turtle, and General St. Clair in 1791 which was the largest defeat of whites by Indians thus far (Faragher 206-207). Conflicts continued to escalate as the mood in the nation became one of Indian resentment of whites and American supremacy over the “savages”.

The book “A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson” is set in a time where the English in Colonial America and the Indians were constantly at conflict. In the year 1675, the Indians besieged the English city of Lancaster (Rowlandson 4). The Indians captured and killed the inhabitants of that city. Rowlandson was one of the few people who were captured instead of killed. She had to fight through to survive the harsh captivity of the Indians, even though she had lost everything.

As I was close to both Massasoit and the colony, I was asked to head the rescue operation to retrieve Massasoit; unfortunately, the Narragansetts also captured me. On the lucky part, maybe due to this new Christian God, the settlers sent a rescue mission for both Massasoit and me. The Colonists were not in a mood to be trifled with. This was evident when they threatened the extinction of the Narragansett tribe if we were not released. Apparently I am important to keep around due to the harshness of the settlers threat against the Narragansett; they released both of us, Massasoit and myself (Adolph,

Today, in American history textbooks, the significant aspects of how America begins is display, however the details that assist in the making of America are not. With this in mind, Fredrick J. Fausz, an Associate Professor of history and director of the Honors Program at St. Mary's College of Mary, decided to display a component of the time, through the article, “Middlemen in Peace and War: Virginia’s Earliest Indian Interpreters, 1608-1632”. In summary, the article conveyed the importance of three significant interpreters, Thomas Savage, Henry Spelmen, and Robert Poole and their interactions between the Indians and Englishmen during the crucial time of war and peace with the Powhatans and other tribes. Fausz’s motivation in writing the article is to argue for the interpreter’s importance and how they interpreted not only the language, but experienced the benefits and detriments of being surrounded by the Indians and English.

The movie, “Pocahontas” is a film about the young daughter of a chief and her adventure with a white man coming to conquer her land. Pocahontas is a spirited girl who is faced with the challenge of choosing her own path or the one her father set for her and she has no idea which one is the correct path. Her father, Powhatan, wants her to marry, Kocoum, a good warrior, but Pocahontas is not convinced on whether she wants to settle down with him. On the other side, John Smith, a successful explorer, is going with a crew paid by the Virginia Company to come to the New World to find gold.

Pocahontas. Americans know her as the beautiful, Indian woman who fell in love with the white settler John Smith and then threw her body upon the poor white captive to protect him from being brutally executed by her own savage tribe. The magical world of Walt Disney came out with their own movie version several years ago portraying Pocahontas as a tan, sexy Barbie doll figure and John Smith as a blond-haired, blue-eyed muscular Ken doll. Although Disney attempts to instill racial tolerance, inter-racial friendship, and nonviolent resolutions in Pocahontas, they contribute to the inaccurate Indian woman stereotype that has evolved from such stories. While it can be argued that Disney has

In Camilla Townsend’s book, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, Townsend points out that there are many historical inaccuracies and myths that are associated with the story of Pocahontas. Using historical evidence to support the story of Pocahontas, Townsend attempted to create an accurate timeline bringing the past to the present. At the same time, the Disney film Pocahontas attempted to depict Algonquian culture accurately, however, according to history, much of the material presented in the film is full of misconceptions and is historically imprecise. In fact, Disney’s Pocahontas epitomizes John Smith and