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Below are several questions pertaining to this week’s film and reading materials—you may respond to whichever questions and related threads you choose. Within each sentence in which you borrow an idea, quote or paraphrase from another author, you must cite the text (Name, “ Article,” Page Number). Remember: you do not have to respond to all of the questions imbedded within each main question—the multidimensional nature of these questions is meant to help open up possibilities in each of your responses. Focus on what you find most meaningful within each inquiry.
QUESTIONS:
1) Assessing the 1995 Disney cartoon film, Pocahontas, key American Indian Movement activist (and voice of Chief Powhatan in the film) Russell Means proclaims,“I think this is the single finest work on Indians done by Hollywood” (qtd. in Stripes 1999). In spite of the film’s ‘positive’ and ‘heroic’ portrayal of Pocahontas, why do scholars such as Leigh Edwards and/or James Stripes posit Disney’s cartoon construction of her as a cultural symbol which:
a) degrades Women of Color—especially Native (and more specifically, Powhatan/Algonquian women)
b) undermines contemporary Native/American Indian social justice movements
c) threatens Native cultural survival
In your post’s subject line, please specify whether you are responding to question 1a, 1b, or 1c.
2) How do specific objects, symbols, and characters within Disney’s Pocahontas construct a film which is an allegory for and legitimization of Manifest Destiny? How does this film’s representation of Pocahontas—her appearance, behavior, and decisions—normalize and soften the blow of Euro-American colonial exploitation of the North American continent (i.e. Indigenous cultures and environmental resources)?
3) In footnote 32 of Leigh Edwards’ 1999 article, she writes, “The film’s ideological messages do not, however, mean that resisting readers—including those who are American Indian, African American, Asian American, Latina, or white—cannot work to read subversive potential into, for instance, Pocahontas’s feminist voice or her status as a non-white speaking subject” (166). Similarly, as James Stripes asserts, “By inserting angry, living Indians into the script of American self-identity, Means and other members challenged the pervasive myth of the vanishing Indian” (1999: 90). What “subversive potential” do you recognize (if any) in Pocahontas as a Native female heroine, or in Native actors and consultants—s uch as Russell Means and Custalow McGowan—within this mass-distributed Disney film?
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