The United Colors of "Pocahontas": Synthetic Miscegenation and Disney's Multiculturalism Author(s): Leigh H. Edwards Source: Narrative, Vol.

7, No. 2, Multiculturalism and Narrative (May, 1999), pp. 147-168 Published by: Ohio State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20107179 . Accessed: 22/02/2014 22:18
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Leigh H. Edwards

The United Synthetic Disney's

o? Pocahontas: and Miscegenation Multiculturalism

Colors

Pocahontas is a babe.1 ?Mel Gibson, the voice of Captain John Smith inDisney's Pocahontas Pocahontas was a story that appealed to us because itwas basically a story about people getting along together in the world. Even though their cultures are very, very different, they have to live on the same land, and that seemed like an enormously appropriate kind of story to tell and one which is particularly ?Roy applicable to lots of places in the world today.2 Disney, Vice Chairman of The Walt Disney Company and head of the Feature Animation Department

The Walt Disney Company's animated film Pocahontas (1995) is the newest and most widely-circulated version of America's Ur-miscegenation story. Pocahon "Indian Princess," has appeared in countless narratives over the past tas, America's and aided English colo four centuries as the native heroine who not only welcomed nization of Virginia, but who also married and had a child with an English settler, John Rolfe, and assimilated to English culture: the first Indian baptized a Christian.3 Her life has become what scholar Bernard W. Sheehan calls "the great archetype of Indian-white conjugal union" (175).4 In the early seventeenth-century, English writ ers celebrated her as supposed proof of the success of England's "civilizing" colonial In subsequent Anglo-American mission. culture, she has come to represent a native of her famous protectress European men; supposed rescue of Captain John Smith has become a rescue of America, instantiated as a central heroic act that consecrated the romanticized colonial project and brought a new nation into being. Numerous retellings of Smith's original narrative, particularly beginning in the nineteenth cen

Her disserta is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Leigh H. Edwards American tion is entitled "Blood Relations: The Cultural Work of Miscegenation in Nineteenth-Century Literature." NARRATIVE, Copyright Vol.7, No. 2 (May 1999) 1999 by The Ohio State University

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descendants of Pocahontas suggests the de Indian Princess gree to which the mythic construction of Pocahontas as America's and in some senses, the "mother of America," has lasting cultural power.6 In this essay, I am interested in asking what kind of cultural relevance the Poc ahontas narrative has in a late twentieth-century context: why has this particular colonial story about a version of first contact reappeared now, and, in view of the film's billion-dollar blockbuster status, why to such resounding market success?7 Given that the narrative is not simply a colonial story but is also our most famous story, how is the theme of racial mixture central to the film's cultural miscegenation work? Iwill argue that what is important about this film?and what demands more critical attention?is how it uses racial mixture and multiethnicity to develop its own version of multiculturalism. some there While has been particular scholarly discus sion of this film, particularly its romanticization of Pocahontas, her culture, and the of racial in mixture the film to has be fully exam colonialism, importance yet ined.8Mixture is the key concept the film uses to shape and understand themeanings it ascribes to culture, gender, and race. The film takes America's first interracial love story and deflects the racial mixing involved in the historical narrative into a visual it prevents actual interracial mixing from occurring while it figure of multiethnicity: Pocahontas's makes animated body visually multiethnic. Through its com explicitly the of plex portrayal miscegenation trope, the film also racializes gender and culture, both roles and cultural behavior to racial identity. Ultimately, it at linking gender to associate with multiculturalism. tempts miscegenation The Pocahontas narrative is a particularly appropriate text for questioning such
convergences between race and culture, as well as what Crenshaw terms the "inter

tury, have constructed a Pocahontas who tiny enterprise and symbolically expiates peoples and the continuing attenuation Americans now claim, impossibly, to be

justifies America's imperial Manifest Des America's guilt about the war upon Native of Native cultures.5 That over two million

sectionality" of race and gender.9 Some of the most important recent critical conver sations in Cultural Studies and American Studies seek to address categories such as in ways that neither substitute one category race, class, and gender simultaneously, for the other nor ignore how they shape and impact each other culturally. The Poca hontas narrative becomes helpful in these conversations because, as critics such as Robert Tilton, Karen Robertson, and Kathleen A. Brown have begun to show, it has evolved as a highly contested textual space in which to shape and debate different constructions of such categories.10 Itwould be possible to trace a history of these cat egories inAmerica by analyzing the changes in Pocahontas narratives over time be cause, as Tilton has illustrated in antebellum texts, the narratives strikingly reflect the changing concerns of their own socio-historical moments. As the Disney film tries to shape the Pocahontas narrative into a story about rather than colonial power relations, it reveals many of the tensions multiculturalism current in present popular understandings of race and culture. The film is important are being commodi because it illustrates how different versions of multiculturalism fied in popular culture. Certainly the version of multiculturalism it offers the viewer is not unique: it assimilates a marginal American Indian culture into the dominant one. The film essentially creates a liberal pluralism in which non Euro-American

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The United Colors

of Pocahontas

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white

peoples and cultures exhibit only superficial differences while gradually be into an Americanism defined by universalized Western con coming homogenized cepts such as individualism and capitalism. The film's version of multiculturalism corresponds closely with Lisa Lowe's critical definition of the term: "Multiculturalism levels the important differences and contradictions within and among racial and ethnic minority groups according to the discourse of pluralism that asserts that American culture is a democratic terrain to

which

every variety of constituency has equal access and in which all are repre the existence of exclusions by recuperating sented, while simultaneously masking and otherness dissent, conflict, through the promise of inclusion" (415). The Disney text displays characteristics of what Robert Stam describes as a "co-opted version" of multiculturalism, which "easily degenerates into a state- or corporate-managed

United-Colors-of-Benetton pluralism whereby established power markets and pack or ideological purposes." The film also shares some for difference commercial ages common sentiment with what Stam describes as a "liberal-pluralist" form of multi culturalism, which "develops a patronizing etiquette of tolerance and inclusiveness, a paternalistic exhortation to 'be nice tominorities,' what Peter Sellers once satirized " as the spirit of 'Take an Indian to lunch this week' (Stam 188-203). In some ways, then, the film testifies to the limitations of liberal pluralism; while the film's producers explicitly set out to portray "cultural diversity" and cor rect some of the ethnic stereotyping of past Disney films, their product mistakes cul tural sameness (i.e. new versions of how to flatter Euro-American culture) for cultural difference. Given that the Pocahontas history is about the first successful En glish colony inAmerica, built on a series of English-Indian wars, the film's attempt to fashion Jamestown into the birthplace of multiculturalism is striking. What is fas the film how and about is it cinating necessarily fails to do so, and precisely why what that failure suggests about the drawbacks of current popular versions of multi culturalism and the reductiveness of public debates about race and culture. The analysis that follows is organized around three main issues: how the film how it creates a depicts miscegenation through representational displacements; racialized gender role for Pocahontas involving racial mixture; and how its portrayal of racial mixture within an assimilationist rhetoric shapes Disney's version of multi culturalism. The film exemplifies a new social technology of liberal pluralism. In a Pocahontas process that I am calling synthetic miscegenation, depicts a purely sym bolic visual representation of multiple cultures, while it simultaneously deflects ac tual racial mixture. This multicultural ambivalence concerning racial mixture signals a new kind of miscegenation taboo, one motivated not by the familiar nineteenth invocations of racial century purity, but rather a new anxiousness concerning the both as a racial of inmulticulturalism?whiteness whiteness possible disappearance culture within pluralism.11 In addition to category and the dominant Anglo-American an with crisis in white identity, the film has also discourse of emergent intersecting become a wildly popular cultural artifact at an historical moment inwhich concepts like multiracialism and hybridity have entered popular consciousness, for example in the recent debates over Census 2000 categories. The film's use of racial mixture in or hy the service of assimilation is exactly the kind of cooptation of multiracialism

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bridity that left-wing critics of these categories fear in an era dominated by anti-affir mative action rhetoric.12 The cultural work this liberal pluralism does inPocahontas is to keep American Indians derealized in theAmerican imaginary, locating them in an ahistorical past and avoiding attention to their present historical situations, which are still dominated mixture
turalism.

symbolic

by colonial power relationships.13 It is precisely by making racial rather thanmaterial that the film can develop this kind of multicul

OF REPRESENTATION TECHNOLOGIES
The only primary historical accounts we have of Pocahontas come from the narratives of Virginia colonists, chiefly those by Captain John Smith, Ralph Hamor, and John Rolfe.14 They tell us that Pocahontas was born in 1595, the favorite daugh ter of Wahunsonacock, also referred to as Powhatan, werowance (paramount chief) of the Powhatans, a tribe of Tidewater Virginia Algonquian-speaking Indians. Her
given name was Matoaka, and Pocahontas was a nickname, meaning "playful one"

She served as intermediary between her father and the claims rescued Smith she him in 1607, after he had been captured by the Pa English. to Indians and her father, who, according to Smith, was about to munkey brought to out the order "beate his brains" give (Barbour 151). Most current scholars agree with Philip Barbour that the famous rescue was part of an elaborate adoption ritual that Smith simply misunderstood (151,441). Thus, while English settlers read Poca hontas's actions as an unequivocal validation of their culture, this primal scene of colonial and the resulting national foundation may have had more to do with com Powhatan's plex political maneuverings?and attempts to subordinate Smith? rather than a simple embrace of European culture. Pocahontas was a child at the time of her interactions with Smith; the myth of a romance between them was created and in the nineteenth century. In 1612, Pocahontas was captured by the popularized She converted to Christianity in 1613, taking the name Lady Rebecca, and English. she married John Rolfe, an English planter, in 1614, giving birth to their son, Thomas, the next year. In 1616, Pocahontas went to London, and she was received at court as an "Indian Princess." She died of tuberculosis and was buried at Gravesend in 1617 as she was about to return toVirginia. From these sketchy traces of her life, a long line of narratives has taken shape, narratives that replay at particularly historical moments a struggle over racial mix ture, liberalism, and national identity. Disney's film adds its own distinctive version. The film opens with the English as they prepare to sail toAmerica, some in search of freedom, adventure, and opportunities, while John Ratcliffe, governor of the New World and the leader of the expedition, is explicitly in search of gold. InAmerica, Pocahontas is struggling to determine the meaning of a recurring dream of her fu ture, while resisting her father's efforts tomarry her to Kocoum, one of his warriors. Pocahontas and John Smith meet soon after the English settlers arrive at Jamestown. the language barrier as Pocahontas They quickly fall in love, magically overcoming suddenly understands English, which she and the other native characters speak throughout the film with no explanation. When she meets Smith, she briefly speaks

or "one full of mischief."

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The United Colors

of Pocahontas

151

in a Disney recreation of Powhatan, then switches back to English when she sud denly becomes fluent through listening to spirit voices. Disney changes her age so that a romance between them becomes more feasible: Pocahontas becomes a beauti ful and voluptuous young woman to Smith's brawny twenty something hero, rather than the girl of eleven or twelve?to she would have been Smith's twenty-six?that at the time of these events. the Indians and settlers are suspicious of each other as the settlers Meanwhile, start to build a fort; a skirmish breaks out near the fort, and Pocahontas and Smith are caught in the middle of two groups preparing for war. Pocahontas sneaks off tomeet Smith, Kocoum follows her, attacks Smith, and is himself killed by an English settler sent by Ratcliffe to spy on Smith. Smith is held for Kocoum's murder, and Powhatan prepares to execute him as the English arrive to fight for Smith. As Pocahontas throws herself on top of Smith, intervening between Powhatan's club and Smith's body, her show of love and sacrifice stops the battle and engenders a call for peace. As peace is declared, Ratcliffe fires at Powhatan, and Smith throws his body in front of Powhatan's, taking the bullet. Smith must be returned to England to recover from and Pocahontas his serious wounds, stays behind to maintain peace, facilitating bonds between the Powhatans and the English based on the Pocahontas-Smith inspi ration of interracial love and sacrifice. The film's treatment of racial mixture is thus paradoxical: it both promotes in terracial romance as a primary factor in securing racial harmony, and yet it also dis from the narrative frame. The film goes to great lengths places actual miscegenation to remove racial mixing from the story; it portrays the myth of a Pocahontas-Smith romance and omits Rolfe, and it ends by separating Pocahontas and Smith, effec tively foreclosing on the possibility of any continuing interracial relationship that would result in sexual miscegenation.15 Early Pocahontas narratives exhibit a similar about racial mixture, often articulated as a tension between two oppos views of miscegenation: interracial union as a tool for peaceful ingAnglo-European race relations (involving assimilation of marginal racial groups and appropriation of their resources) versus racial mixture as taboo (a threat towhite racial purity).16 Ear has always been a con lier narratives thus show the degree towhich miscegenation tested ideological site, and they often incorporate competing ideologies of racial mixture as well, by both invoking and deflecting miscegenation.17 ambivalence

SYNTHETIC MISCEGENATION
its ambivalent treatment of misce The primary way inwhich the film mediates a is series of through representational displacements. What is striking about genation to appear: itwrites racial the Disney text is the way inwhich it allows miscegenation mixture onto Pocahontas's possibility multiethnic
Caucasian

body. Synthetic miscegenation for sexual miscegenation. Pocahontas becomes

displaces and replaces the an historically-impossible

anachronistic body?an image composed of "aesthetically-pleasing" and Indian, African American, Asian American, body parts drawn from American
models.

Disney

animator Glen Keane

describes

his Pocahontas

drawing

as "an ethnic

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blend whose convexly curved face isAfrican, whose dark, slanted eyes areAsian and whose body proportions are Caucasian" (qtd. in Tillotson C8). In addition to histori cal representations of Pocahontas herself, the visual models of various ethnicities that Keane used for his drawing included Irene Bedard, the American Indian actor who Indian consultant to the film Shirley "Little provides Pocahontas's voice, American model Dove" Custalow McGowan, Filipino Dyna Taylor, black supermodel Naomi Kate and Christy Turlington.18 Keane's ani and Moss white supermodels Campbell, and a series of cell drawings mation process included three-dimensional modeling thatwere colored and combined to create themoving, animated image of Pocahontas. laserdisc boxed set, Keane introduces In a striking video clip that appears in Disney's his Pocahontas drawing to a studio audience by comparing it to his Ariel from Dis ney's The Little Mermaid. He draws Ariel, projecting her face onto a screen, then draws Pocahontas and overlays her onto Ariel. Keane tells the audience that because Pocahontas is "ethnic," her facial structure will be "the opposite" of Ariel's Caucasian one, and he points out what he describes as Pocahontas's "ethnic" features, such as her "Asian" forehead, which is much lower than Ariel's. In his narrative and literal juxtaposition of these two faces, Keane effectively describes a white norm versus a brown variation, a non-ethnic animated face versus an ethnic one. In his distinction between Ariel and Pocahontas, Pocahontas is no longer specifically American Indian but rather an undifferentiated visual compilation of non-white ethnicities. Jeffrey Katzenberg charged Keane with creating a Pocahontas Significantly, that would be "the finest creature the human race has to offer" (qtd. in Kim 23). His is not comment registers the racial collapse her body enacts: Disney's Pocahontas more a the "human race." this she universal is of member American Indeed, Indian, Pocahontas takes on a marked status within the visual universe of the text. Her long, eyes, and flowing waist-length angular facial structure, pert nose, almond-shaped her and around is billows hair?which parted on one side with an artful constantly American Indian women her from the other in the supermodel flip?differentiate film, who are pictured with larger eyes and noses, more rounded faces, their hair ei ther in bangs or long and parted in the middle.19 This Indian Princess is somehow vi establish her as a complex, sually Other. The film's stereotyped racial morphologies in not quite decipherable mix of ethnicities while its visuals type the other women the film differently, mately, Pocahontas Indian. Ulti setting them up as Disney's version of American looks almost as much like the Caucasian women bidding their husbands farewell on the docks in England as she does her fellow Powhatans. Pocahontas appears as amarker for interracial sex and reproduction in a process

of synthetic miscegenation. By visually displacing racial mixture onto her body and as a purely symbolic or virtual the film it invokes miscegenation there, containing formed Her body, purely through representation, becomes a figure. miscegenated The film thus relocates racial mixture from its nar stand-in for actual miscegenation. rative onto its visual field, using particular technologies of representation: complex, fabricated visuals and bodies generated by animation technology. Indeed, inmaking what has been trumpeted as their first multiethnic heroine, Disney, as Iwill argue in the final section of this essay, collapses all non-white ethnicities onto her body in one in order tomake her a spokesmodel for a reductive version of multiculturalism, which the visual marker of brownness stands in for cultural diversity.

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The United Colors

of Pocahontas

153

In a sense, Pocahontas becomes a cyborg figure inDonna Haraway 's use of the term: "a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (149). This Pocahontas creature is an animated record of the his race relations, as her body becomes a metonymy for the social re tory of American inAmerica. At the same time, this social reality is grafted of racial mixture ality onto the historical figure of Pocahontas in a way that makes her representation nec layer added onto a foundation of my thohis essarily ahistorical and fictive?another as available to us now is a "creature of of Pocahontas the tory, only representation a folklore. The film's synthetic miscegena and of fiction," myth figure composed status as always already multira tion mediates cultural ambivalence. Pocahontas's cial creates a model of symbolic multiracialism which obviates the need for actual the film taps racial mixture's symbolic power to engender alle miscegenation; giance from two races while avoiding actual mixing and its attendant complication here both transgresses and reinforces no of racial categories. Thus miscegenation and assimilationist tions of racial purity.20 This need to assert the peace-making on a symbolic rather than a material level echoes the ante value of miscegenation Indians precisely because bellum American practice of romanticizing theAmerican no were and longer perceived as a military or political displaced, "vanishing," they threat. As Roy Harvey Pearce has argued, it is because Indians were placed in the in the present that they were able to be por past or distanced non-threateningly as "noble" rewriting of colonial relations in Virginia trayed (194-95).21 Disney's can take the liberty to portray a nostalgically-inflected peace between natives and as ahistoric natives settlers, depicting symbols, precisely because Euro-Americans Indians and their cultures and appropri have displaced and marginalized American ated many of their resources. is a familiar move; Tilton notes This displacement of salvatory miscegenation thatmany colonial and early republican writers, including Thomas Jefferson, held up Pocahontas as an example of the lost opportunity to generate "one race" inAmerica, but always also temporally displaced a desire for interracial mixture onto the past or the future (3). They imply that if interracial mixture had only occurred in the past or could occur in the future, racial conflict could have been or could yet be avoided. These writers never imagine mixture occurring in the present. In Disney's Pocahon is temporally displaced beyond the frame of the film both in the tas, miscegenation sense that John Rolfe does not appear and Pocahontas's body itself is outside of his are thus coupled with temporal dis tory. The film's representational displacements is to deflect a synthetic these of the effect and displacements placements, a onto while the past retaining symbolic power for racial mixture in miscegenation the present.

OF RACEAND GENDER TECHNOLOGIES

another central way in which the film to synthetic miscegenation, depicts racial mixture is through the racialized gender role it scripts for Pocahontas's character, that of cultural mediator. The film not only displaces racial mixture onto her body, but also understands her as assimilable because of how its representational In addition

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acts constitute her as a woman of color. Strikingly, in addition to screening footage of supermodels, Keane went to books on classical Western beauty so that he could "concoct a heroine that John Smith, or any man, animated or otherwise, might love" Making). This comment suggests, from the point of view of the Anglicized (qtd. in
male age," gaze, that Pocahontas's Other. beauty must overcome her race?her status as a "sav as a racial

first scene of its heroine is a highly eroticized one: the animated Pocahontas's shot is a close-up on her standing on cliff as the camera lovingly pans around her examination of her. Her waist-length hair is body, making a minute 360-degree blowing like a banner behind her, gently brushing her buttocks, while her face is up turned, eyes closed in an expression of pure ecstasy as she breathes in the forest air. Smith's moment of first contact with her echoes this initial shot. Smith has been scouting in the forest for Indians, prepared to use his vaunted skills as an Indian fighter. He jumps through a waterfall, having noticed movement on the other side, with his gun aimed directly at Pocahontas. He is immediately arrested by her beauty. the film's action halts as the As she materializes through the mist of the waterfall, camera gazes, simulating what Mary Louise Pratt has theorized as the imperial or pale male gaze, which fixes the natural landscape, including indigenous peoples, be neath it.22 With her long black hair swirling behind her, her Indian princess costume cut high in the thigh, hanging from one shoulder, and her voluptuous figure, Poca hontas stands as a icon of Western female beauty. As standards of exoticized Gertrude Custalow, amember of the Powhatan tribe, noted in a 1995 interview about the film, "The real Pocahontas was a child, not a voluptuous woman. And one thing's didn't own an uplift bra" (qtd. in Tillotson C8). Her body signifies as a for sure?she racialized sexual object on the screen, a "brown-skinned Barbie doll," a multiethnic, to use Mel Gibson's term, "babe" (qtd. in Tillotson C8). If she had been anything other than a beautiful Indian woman in this context, Smith might have shot first and asked questions later, as Governor Ratcliffe instructs all of the colonists to do, rather than becoming entranced by her. Pocahontas's eroticized body thus performs a cru cial gender role in this encounter: she is the racialized native sexual object for the colonizing male subject. As Pocahontas takes up the role of cultural mediator, she learns that it is her job to educate the English settlers as well as her own people that the opposing culture is not "savage," and that the two groups can be allies rather than enemies; the way she brings this peace depends on Smith falling in love with her, in the gendered and raced process described above, and on her symbolic sacrifice for him. Intersectional ity is at work in the Disney film when it portrays Pocahontas as someone who can mediate male between two racialized cultures precisely because she is, to the settlers, a fe racial Other and, to current audiences, awoman of color. Underlying this vision a colonial of is assimilation which of Pocahontas operates on ideology long-standing can most cultures Native that the idea Euro-American women, or easily assimilate more specifically that Euro-American men can marry and assimilate Native women and thus begin a process of racial and cultural assimilation of non-Europeans through miscegenation. While colonial England predominantly viewed miscegena tion negatively and began to legislate against it, a number of English writers and set

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The United Colors

o/Pocahontas

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tiers advocated the opposing European colonial ideology of miscegenation practiced by France and Spain, which encouraged racial intermarriage as a policy for building alliances and furthering assimilation. For example, the Board of Trade explicitly rec ommended to the crown in 1721 thatmiscegenation become an official colonial pol that should be given to such of your Majesty's icy, arguing "proper encouragement as the should with native Indians" subjects intermarry (qtd in Jacobs 119).23 In tap ping into this kind of gendered dynamic, the film thus also helps to complicate un derstandings of race and culture by forcefully pointing to the interdependent role ideas of race and gender play in formulating cultural conceptions of racial mixture. Pocahontas internalizes her role as Disney's multicultural educator through a specific process of gendered socialization in the film, involving what Teresa DeLau retis theorizes as the "technology of gender," inwhich gender, "both as representa tion and self-representation, is the product of various social technologies, such as and of institutionalized and critical cinema, discourses, epistemologies, practices, as well as practices of daily life" (2). The film both displays the social practices by comes to understand her gendered role and itself performs a ped a social technology producing gender. Pocahontas's as function socializa agogical tion in the film, for example, occurs most clearly through the interaction between the text's two most prevalent recurring symbols: the necklace of Pocahontas's dead mother and the spinning arrow in Pocahontas's dream, which we later find out repre sents Smith's compass. The necklace and arrow symbols work together to influence which Pocahontas actions. Both explicitly represent bundles of social practices and social conditioning, all organized around gender and ethnic roles, that Pocahontas is forced to respond to and navigate. The necklace introduces a marriage plot into the film and drapes Pocahontas with the mantle of romantic heroine. Her father places the necklace around her neck to symbolize the necessity of her marrying the Indian warrior of his choice and tak ing her place in society as the wife of a powerful tribal leader, just like her mother. At the beginning of the film, Powhatan returns from battle with his warriors and Poca in the forest, reunites with him. hontas, called back to the village from wandering She tells him about the dream she has been having, which she thinks signals that "something exciting is about to happen." Powhatan responds that "something excit ing is about to happen," because Kocoum, their bravest young warrior, has "asked for her hand in marriage." Pocahontas has no interest in Kocoum, whom she finds and and overly-serious protests "But Father, I think my dream is pointing me boring, down a different path." In response, Powhatan raises her dead mother's necklace, a pendant hanging from a beautiful sky-blue circle of fabric, and places it around her Pocahontas's neck. The necklace symbolizes marriage because Pocahontas's mother had worn it at her own wedding; Powhatan uses it to instruct Pocahontas to pass into a particular kind of womanhood and take her rightful place in society, as the wife of a tribal leader and consequently awoman of high class status. As he bestows the necklace on her, Powhatan
steady river."

says: "Even the wild mountain

stream must

someday

join the big,

volved

Her mother's role in this interchange emphasizes the gender socialization in in the marriage plot. The necklace as amaterial object signifies Pocahontas's

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into a patriarchal system inwhich women are exchanged between men though marriage, explicitly in the terms of property transferal. Kocoum has asked for her hand, it is Powhatan's to give him. Their invocation of her mother ismeant to so cialize Pocahontas into a gendered tradition of marrying the acceptable male chosen socialization
by one's father.

this gendered script departs from Powhatan Indian social customs Significantly, in seventeenth-century Virginia. It thus indicates the degree to which the film con structs gender roles that are embedded, in the context of the film as a whole, in a Western matrix of ideas of miscegenation, Powhatan and assimilation. colonization, women, for example, had the power to choose their own husbands (Brown 50). An thropologists such as Eleanor Burke Leacock have worked to dispel what she terms "myths of male dominance," arguing that many native cultures operated on egalitar ian political structures and sharply contrasted the hierarchical, patriarchal power structures found among European colonizers.24 Powhatan society, part of a larger mid-Atlantic Coastal Algonquian culture, was organized on an egalitarian model: land rights and political power were passed down matrilineally; women had signifi cant political and economic power and could, for example, be chiefs; there was also a reciprocal exchange of gendered labor (Grumet 43-62). While some scholars dis agree about the degree towhich Pocahontas's society was becoming stratified along was certainly not a European patri lines in Powhatan's the culture time, gender focus of Powhatan culture significantly diverges from the archy.25 The matrilineal film's depiction of them. In addition to deflecting attention from current conditions inNative America, the other cultural work the film does is to place American Indians into patriarchal family units, while in fact native cultures represent a real contrast to the litany of patriarchy, property, and nuclear family repeated at the core of Ameri can national identity. As Pocahontas rebels against her father and falls in love with Smith, the symbol of the compass arrow takes precedence over the necklace, guiding the direction of Pocahontas's romantic affection. The compass symbolizes both John Smith and, as an instrument of English technology explicitly used tomap and appropriate the New World and Indian land, also suggests colonial power relations and Pocahontas's sub ordinated place in them. After talking with her father, Pocahontas leaves her village to visit the forest home of her spiritual advisor, Grandmother Willow, amagical tree. to rebel against her father when Pocahontas, in effect, elicits permission from Willow she asks about her dream and her impending marriage. Willow prophesies: "It seems tome this spinning arrow is pointing you down your path," and then sings her a song, telling Pocahontas to listen to the spirits all around her, living in the earth, the water, and the sky, and they will guide her. The next moment, Pocahontas sees Smith's ship and Smith's arrival sets arriving on shore; the juxtaposition of her talk with Willow this second, far stronger marriage plot inmotion. The initial marriage plot symboli is shot; as he falls to the ground, his hand catches in the cally dies when Kocoum necklace around Pocahontas's neck, tearing it to the ground with him. The symbolic exchange of Smith for Kocoum becomes complete when, at the end of the film, Poc ahontas's animal friends find her mother's necklace and replace it around her neck as she embraces Smith. Smith's compass also points to Pocahontas's most famous act of mediation and

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Pocahontas's supposed rescue of Smith. When Pocahontas meets Smith in the forest to try and find a way to avert the battle, Smith is convinced that war is raccoon friend, Meeko, and inevitable. Grandmother Willow, using Pocahontas's Governor Ratcliffe's pug dog, Percy, shows Smith that peace is possible. Meeko and Percy, who have been chasing each other violently, are calmed by Grandmother Wil low, and they abandon their battle. Pocahontas then urges Smith to come and speak conciliation: with Powhatan about averting war, and when he agrees, Pocahontas embraces him and they kiss for the first time. Pocahontas, following Willow's example, takes on the romance linked with to their and Smith role agrees help, becoming peace-maker their attempts to serve as intermediaries between their peoples. After Kocoum sur prises them in the forest and Smith is taken captive for his murder, Pocahontas is left alone, trying to think of a way to avert both Smith's execution and the impending war. She realizes for the first time that the arrow in her dream is Smith's compass, and that it is pointing her back to her village to intervene. Thus, she rushes to per form the rescue. Her act halts the fighting and brings peace, and in her decision to remain behind when Smith leaves for England to repair his wound, she chooses cul tural mediation as her most important role, saying "this ismy path." Disney's film fashions itsmessage of cultural tolerance and mediation by privi leging the spinning arrow over the necklace as a determinant of Pocahontas's "true" role and identity. The film establishes a gendered pattern for this cultural mediation; both Pocahontas's mother and figurative grandmother continually instruct Pocahon tas to play the role of the mediator. Just as Grandmother Willow prompts Pocahontas towards Smith and instructs her in peace-making, Pocahontas's mother appears from beyond the grave to bring racial harmony and help Pocahontas do the same. Her leaves carried by the wind, ap mother's spirit, represented by flowing multicolor as scene moments the inwhich Pocahontas and Smith such at the in film, pears key first meet; her mother's is one of the spirit voices that helps her understand English. Her mother's most significant role comes in the climactic rescue scene. As Powhatan throws her body in the way, raises his club to execute Smith, and Pocahontas Powhatan hears the spirit of his wife urging him to listen to Pocahontas's requests for peace. All three women establish amatrilineal tradition of responsibility for bringing cultural peace and racial harmony.

BABESAND MULTICULTURALISM MULTIETHNIC

in two crucial ways. It collapses all non category, brownness, and it assim ilates them into aWestern world view. My close reading of the film's synthetic addresses this first function, the creation of undifferentiated multieth miscegenation of Pocahontas's gender role in the and my reading of the film's manipulation nicity, white The film's multiculturalism races into one multiethnic, functions undifferentiated service of colonialism addresses this second, accompanying function, assimilation on of the film's as discussion will ism. In this final section of the essay, I my expand to Pocahontas's which the degree similationism character, as a by showing has been assimilated to spokesmodel for a the film's version of multiculturalism, Anglo-American culture.

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The Disney film makes a significant revision in the Pocahontas story when it pictures Smith rescuing Powhatan. This act establishes some sense of reciprocity be tween Pocahontas and Smith, between her culture and his. Smith is willing to offer the same sacrifice that Pocahontas does: his own life. Prompted by their romantic at tachment, their acts ultimately signify in a much larger colonial context as the sym bolic willingness of each culture to lay down its life for peaceful co-existence and racial harmony. As their respective groups follow their lead, the goal of peace is achieved by their acts of self-sacrifice. As Smith departs for England, the film leaves us with the sense that Pocahontas and Smith will "always be with each other," im plying that Pocahontas will be figuratively conjoined with Smith in her work toward cultural assimilation, while avoiding the issue of racial assimilation. Pocahontas's and Smith's mirrored rescue acts establish a similarity between In addition to their common vision of racial harmony and their of interracial romance, the two also share other beliefs that estab positive example lish the film's privileging of Western, specifically Anglo-American, ideologies. A link between them is drawn early in the film. During the Susan Constant's voyage to America, Smith heroically dives from his ship to save a drowning crew member. As the film cuts to a scene inAmerica, Pocahontas's friend Nakoma calls her back to the village to see her returning father. Pocahontas, however, effectively evades the pater nal command by diving off awaterfall, delaying her return in order to follow her own the two characters. desires and continue her play in the forest awhile longer. The two diving shots echo each other precisely. They suggest that while Smith's heroism lies in saving his fel low Englishmen lies in rebelling against her father through his bravery, Pocahontas's and "choosing her own path," which, as discussed above, comes to mean falling in love with Smith and fostering racial peace through cultural mediation. As mentioned earlier, in the larger cultural history of Pocahontas narratives, Pocahontas's heroism has come tomean the same as Smith's: saving the English and their colonial project. For this film, these two shots also pictorially establish a shared ideological frame work: romanticism and heroism within the context of an American individualism and Manifest Destiny. The film's treatment of assimilation and cultural power emerges most clearly in the moment of first contact between Smith and Pocahontas. In this scene, Pocahon tas and Smith are able to communicate with each other precisely because her Amer ican Indian spirituality guides her to Smith's language; the film thus strikingly It pictures her own culture as the impetus for her assimilation. her hears spirit voices and Grandmother Willow's song telling recreation of heart" that she abandons the momentary Disney moment in the This of transformation film, perhaps more glish.26 dicates
path.

is the moment to "listen with Powhatan

she her

for En

the degree

to which

Pocahontas

is ultimately

following

than any other, in an assimilationist

the scene continues, Smith casually labels the Powhatans "savages," whose lives the English can "improve," and Pocahontas launches a critique of his cultural imperialism. However, her facility with English language only reinforces her assim is already critiquing colonialism from within. In order to educate Smith ilation?she about her own "civilized" culture, Pocahontas takes him on a running tour through As

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the forest as they sing the film's theme song, which encourages the listener to "paint with all the colors of the wind." Perhaps the best example of the film's multicultural ism is the song's lines: "If you walk the footsteps of a stranger, you'll learn things you never knew you never knew," amulticultural anthem clearly sung for the benefit of Smith and the English settlers in the film. Smith undergoes a conversion inwhich he now sees all the wonders of nature and the spiritual connection of people to the natural world. Having taken Smith on a rapid and reductive tour of her culture, Poc ahontas has given the English subject the ability to experience a superficial version of her native culture as object. Her lesson to Smith emphasizes an Indian spirituality rooted in the natural world, which becomes a metonymy for Powhatan culture; the amorphousness of this portrayal suspends the particularity of native culture. While is due to the inherent reductiveness of an animated film part of this simplification made for a children's market, this reductiveness also lends itself to Disney's multi
culturalism.

The collapse of Pocahontas's culture into a vague connection with nature also serves to downplay cultural difference and foreground the sameness of the two cul tures. The film, on one level, seems to offer amutual cultural assimilation, a "middle ground" of exchange.27 Indeed, Powhatan calls Smith his brother and Smith takes a bark back to England with him, a piece of portable culture. Yet packet of Willow's this assimilation appears in the context of the film's multiculturalism, which deflates the violence of the colonial enterprise but does not question the integrity of the colo nial project. For example, anthropologist Pauline Turner Strong points out that the word "savage" dominates the film as settlers and Natives both repeatedly hurl the ep ithet at each other in dialogue and in song; she argues that the film distorts the history of colonial uses of an ideology of "savagism" to justify exterminating and dispos sessing native peoples because it tries tomake the savagism seem reciprocal. Like Dances with Wolves, this film romanticizes American Indian culture and offers it as a commodity for Anglo-American Willow's bark, symbol consumption.
izing Pocahontas's culture, becomes a commodity that Smith can transport, con

sume, and appropriate. The film's class critique condemns English greed embodied by the aristocracy, nodding to the excesses of that culture, but the text also embraces the technology Smith's culture offers. It celebrates Pocahontas's culture for its nat ural spirituality, valued because it can salve weary English spirits. Significantly, Poc ahontas's tour through the forest of her culture emphasizes the connection of all a the ends before colo universalism. film liberal Conveniently, peoples, anchoring nial power relations would have to resurface?before attacks on the English Powhatans and neighboring tribes in the 1610s, the 1622 and 1644 Powhatan attacks on Jamestown, and the subsequent large-scale English military assaults that by the end of the seventeenth
tions.

century resulted in huge losses of Indian land and people, and tribes in the Chesapeake Bay area to reserva the removal of Algonquian-speaking

In the film's multicultural version of American Indian history, Indians appear as figures from a rewritten past. Powhatan tribal member Custalow Mc Gowan, hired as chief "American Indian consultant" to the film, comments that the romanticized Disney version of history quickly alienated her: "Iwas honored to be asked by them

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... but Iwasn't at the studio two hours before I began tomake clear my objections to what they were doing... had said that the film would be they historically accurate. I soon found that itwasn't to be_I wish my name wasn't on it. Iwish Pocahontas's name wasn't on it" (qtd. inVincent E5). She has also noted: "You're not honoring a nation of people when you change their history" (qtd. inKilpatrick 36-37). The pro ducers' attempts to authenticate their film with "American Indian advisors," illustrate the degree to which socio-historical constructions of race and culture are linked in to casting American In film's addition Indian actors for that evade the ways grasp. some of the voices, Disney hired several American such as Indian consultants to advise them on Powhatan culture and, presumably, the Custalow McGowan "American Indian experience." In so doing, they replicate an error that strangely res of U.S. land treaties with American onates with the "misunderstandings" Indians, in which U.S. officials wrongly assumed that one person could both speak for an Indian tribe and individually possess collective land. Here, Disney makes a "treaty" to use Indian cultures with the permission and advice of a group of hired consul American tants. A few individuals of a particular race stand in for an entire set of cultures. Of course, the issue of both political and cultural representation ismuch more compli cated than that, and there has been an expectedly wide array of reactions to the film from different American Indian communities and individuals.28 The fact that one of Disney's main American Indian authenticators is Russell some of illustrates who is the problematics of representa Lakota, strikingly Means, tion that I have been discussing. The Disney press packet quotes Means, one of the and the voice of Powhatan in the film, as founders of theAmerican Indian Movement ever done on American Indians by Hol "the that the finest film is work single saying sent Means the for also his approval, taking some of his sug lywood." Disney script more for culture Powhatan Means indicated that when he authentic. making gestions was sent the script, he found it "full of stereotypes," but his later comments about the impressive quality of the film suggest thatMeans himself was able to "correct" many of those stereotypes (qtd. in Sharkey 22). Disney seems towant Means to stand in for anAmerican Indian viewpoint or opinion, essentializing a native voice, but this kind of authenticating move is always hopelessly reductive. In the case of Means, the failure of representation in terms of cultural depiction, social voice, and political proxy is foregrounded, given thatAIM's claims to repre sent American Indian interests have been disputed by some local tribal organizations and governments and, in reference to the film itself, some of Means's colleagues at a sepa AIM strongly disagree with his opinions.29 For instance, Vernon Bellecourt, has consistently been at odds with Means ideologically, rejects Means's and endorsement of the film, critiquing Means for "playing Tonto to Hollywood" being "a better actor than he is an activist." Bellecourt labels the film "a piece of buf the very com falo chip," and goes on to argue that the film's "concept oversimplifies ratist who and and immigrant America, plex historical relationship between native America truth about the of the millions" in Tillotson up slaughter C8). despicable (qtd. glosses Means's inability to validate his claims of representativeness speak to the problems Indians at this of political representation as a concept, particularly for American

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in cultural expression. juncture, and the failure of the concept of representativeness That Disney would deploy Means as what I am calling a cultural treaty-maker indi cates their misapprehension of the authenticity of representation. The version of multiculturalism implicit in the film's thematics is reinforced by the marketing and launching of the Disney film, and the rhetoric that accompanied it, creating a particular kind of multicultural representational field around the film. Co Producer Mike Gabriel, for example, emphasizes the fact that he developed the idea for the film on Thanksgiving Day?a day he clearly interprets as a celebration of cul that many American Indians conversely view it as a day of a and that the film lavishly premiered in Central Park?obviously mourning, given land conflicts?this kind of background central symbolic site marking Native-settler to the film suggests the degree towhich it emanates from a liberal pluralism that pro ceeds unaware, perhaps willfully, of how it appropriates marginal cultures. Gabriel's initial story pitch to Disney conveys his attempt to shape this colonial story into a parable of cultural tolerance and diversity: "A beautiful Indian Princess falls in love with a European settler and is torn between her father's wishes to destroy the settlers and her own wishes to help them" (qtd. in Making). Director Eric Goldberg describes tural tolerance. Given the project in similar terms: "Everyone knew the tale about her saving John Smith's life, and it seemed like a natural for telling a story about two separate clashing worlds trying to understand each other" (qtd. in Making). I refer back to one of my epigraphs, a quotation from Roy Disney, Vice Chair man of The Walt Disney Company and head of the Feature Animation Department. His comments further position the text within a Disney multicultural pedagogy: "Pocahontas was a story that appealed to us because itwas basically a story about people getting along together in the world. Even though their cultures are very, very different, they have to live on the same land, and that seemed like an enormously ap is particularly applicable to lots of propriate kind of story to tell and one which the in in world today" (qtd. Making). Disney's quotation normalizes and sanc places tions the imperial project by suggesting that groups of people "have to live on the same land," while dehistoricizing the imperial context for group conflicts over land. His statement elides the fact that imperialism played itself out racially. It naturalizes and displaces American racial conflict rooted in the history of imperialism and colo nization by locating the problems of cultural relations in "lots of places in the world today." The phrase "people getting along together" also vaguely echoes (as perhaps an unintentional intertext) the spectre of the L.A. riots and Rodney King's entreaty, "can't we all just get along."30 Coupled with the fact that the film's Pocahontas is a visual symbol whose composition includes representations of black as well as Indian comment this that the troubled question of black-white race relations races, suggests and the loaded historical reality of black-white miscegenation haunts the film, to the list of displacements made onto Pocahon adding black-white miscegenation sense of peaceful co tas's body. The quotation also foregrounds a decontextualized existence hierarchies and omits, as the film does, the issue of racial assimilation involved in that concept. Indians depart from history, both colonial and the power in the

Pocahontas's

and present,

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sense that they incongruously become a symbol for racial harmony in a colonial con text and a symbol for multiculturalism in a present created by imperialism. Peter Schneider, president of Walt Disney Studio's Animation Division, says of the film: "We set out to do something inspired by the legend, not tomake a documentary. No body knows the truth of her legend. We simply set out to make a beautiful movie about theAmerican Indian experience" (qtd. in Roccisano C10). Yet the multicultur alism the film articulates corresponds closely to what E. San Juan describes as the liberal "orthodox conception of the dominant culture as simply comprising lifestyles that one can pick and wear any time one pleases" (106), or what Stanley Fish terms "boutique multiculturalism."31 The film expresses the idea thatAmerican Indian cul ture can be offered up as amonolithic consumable article, replete with multicultural values and lifestyles sutured toAmerican Indianness. Indeed, Disney, in deploying their highly-refined, multinational corporate marketing machinery, trumpeting Poca hontas as their first "ethnic heroine," launched a $125 million marketing blitz, with for tie-ins, including Pocahontas dolls, action figures, clothes, lunch boxes, books, and audio tapes six months before the film's release (Stanley 1-3). $50 million I have been arguing in this essay that Disney's Pocahontas figures racial mix ture as a site for engendering racial harmony and assimilation of native peoples and cultures, and that it simultaneously makes Pocahontas's body the symbol of that mixture. To extend my arguments further: as the film links the ideologies of race and culture together, Pocahontas becomes both the spokesmodel and the source of the film's multiculturalism. Disney's text creates a new origin or prehistory for multicul turalism: native culture itself somehow creates white liberal pluralism and exists for the sole purpose of teaching pluralism's lessons. When Disney locates its version of it also makes this ideology particularly American. multiculturalism in Pocahontas, Pocahontas signifies as America's first aristocrat, indigenous nobility; thus she cre ates an indigenously multicultural America. Philip Young, attempting to account for the popularity of the Pocahontas myth, has argued: "This story will work for any cul
ture, informing us, whoever we are, that we are chosen, or preferred. Our own ways,

race, religion must be better?so much better that even an Indian (Magian, Moor, Turk), albeit an unusually fine one (witness her recognition of our superiority), per ceived our rectitude" (413). His comment registers the ways in which Pocahontas narratives are evoked historically to flatter the dominant culture. In Disney's version of the story, native culture, exemplified by Pocahontas, be a pedagogical tool. In a sense, Pocahontas's anachronistically multiethnic to America 1607 back from 1995 travels body Virginia, a projection of multicultural values meant to repair the violence of colonialism.32 The Disney film enacts, in very comes and Anglo-American material ways, the historical transmission of Anglo-European it of American Indian the bodies culture through women; figures an American body to on and take Pocahontas's body up their roles as multicul urges its viewers politic a not "beautiful movie about theAmer tural citizens. This Pocahontas offers viewers a ican Indian experience" but rather story about the lasting cultural power of a Melting Pot version of symbolic assimilation.

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ENDNOTES
1. Qtd. 2. Qtd in Tillotson in The Making (C8). of Pocahontas.

3. Throughout this essay, when I refer to Pocahontas and her socio-political group, Iwill use the term term used in studies of colonial political relations. Iwill also, whenever "Indian" as the historical pos name for her tribe, "Powhatans." When I refer to current sible, use the more specific self-identified multicultural Indians." I invoke term, "American debates, Iwill use the current most frequently-used these words with the knowledge is unsatisfactory and that the question that much of this terminology of naming is troubled by the history of colonial and imperial power relations. Pocahontas's interracial union with Rolfe occurred within the context of marriage, of marriage. the term

4. While

miscegenation 5. Tilton sions. 6. Deloria with with provides

refers to interracial a superb cultural

sex and reproduction history of

both

in and outside narrative,

the Pocahontas

focusing

on antebellum

ver

Caucasians

in which a large number of he terms an "Indian grandmother complex" the white was linked insatiably search for female Indian ancestors, because "somehow a noble house of gentility and culture if his grandmother was an Indian princess who ran away an intrepid pioneer"; he notes that the result of these fantasies is that "a large portion of the has identified what population will eventually be related to Powhatan" (11-12).

American 7. Since

an event which itself its June 10, 1995 premiere in Central Park before 110,000 spectators, initial in earned $1 million, the film has generated well over $1 billion in revenues on an $80 million vestment. The Walt Disney Company's 33rd animated film, it is one of Disney's top five highest to date and has generated financial success for the company on a global scale. Recent grossing movies

include a "Spirit of Pocahontas" touring ice show in 1997 and a Sotheby's merchandising projects sale of animated art from the film, which grossed around 500,000 pounds. The film has also prompted a huge increase in visitors both to Jamestown and to Gravesend, the English town where Pocahontas and Jackson; "Disney's Animated Classic.'" is buried. See Edgerton 8. Edgerton and Jackson examine the film's romantic fantasy of Indians and its avoidance of ideological in the mainstream reactions to the movie issues, arguing that both factors generated mixed press as text well as inAmerican Indian communities. and Ono argue that the film is a neocolonial Buescher which as part of its effort to "civilize" colonialism; tries to co-opt feminism and environmentalism narratives. Henke, they provide a reading of the film's characters as symbolic figures in neocolonialist et al. discuss recent Disney heroines as postfeminist characters, who are able to be assertive but only of colo in the context of a patriarchal status quo. Strong has also critiqued the film's romanticization in an on-line review of the film.

nization

term for the theory that race and gender are not mutually is Crenshaw's 9. "Intersectionality" exclusive, but rather coextensive and interrelated categories of experience and analysis. See "Demarginalizing" and "Mapping." 10. Tilton to figure an alternative intellectual details, for example, how Southern authors used Pocahontas and social history for the South, versus the Plymouth/Puritan origins of the North. As Tilton notes, it is highly ironic that a Southern culture based on racial segregation would identify its origin in a figure

Brown analyzes what she terms racial mixture and in an act of interracial union (145-75). signifying an "Anglo-Indian in which the English and Algo Gender Frontier" in seventeenth-century Virginia, rather than be dominated tribes of the Chesapeake Bay area struggled to dominate nquian-speaking racial by using gender categories as a primary way of legitimating political authority and constructing own subjectivity in English accounts of her and categories. Robertson attempts to locate Pocahontas's provides an excellent analysis of "the intertwining grids of race, class, and gender" in the early sev

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enteenth

century. argues

Other

Green, who dian-White Princess 11. On

that Smith's

relations, or demonized

for analyses of race and gender in Pocahontas narratives include a persisting model of In account of Pocahontas not only established as either celebrated but also a national model for understanding Indian women Squaw. See also Fiedler identity, on the Squaw and Winant; as "anti-Pocahontas." Wiegman. category National to the inter

sources

the emerging

crisis of white

see Omi

12. The U.S. U.S.

to add a "multiracial" government recently rejected a national movement census 2000, yet itwill allow citizens to check several racial or ethnic categories.

racial groups like Project Race (which since 1991 has lead efforts to institute a multiracial category on all Federal forms) have insisted that a multiracial is needed to reflect racial identity accu category descent. Meanwhile, groups like the rately and to prevent discrimination against people of multiracial NAACP that a new category such as this one would dilute the number of blacks and other in Federal Aid programs and reduce the political of groups counted specific minority representation these groups because the census category would and make it impact issues such as federal districting, to trace discrimination almost groups. Significantly, impossible against blacks and other minority have argued

as Newt Gingrich, leaders and pundits?and conservative of affirmative action?such opponents have come out in support of the new multiracial category. See Will; George Will, and Dinesh D'Souza I would argue that the multiracialism in Pocahontas D'Souza. is a good example of the NAACP's worst fears: the film's multiracialism the political voice of mi leads to assimilation and eliminates nority groups 13. These Marshall colonial such as American power Indians.

Court

to the U.S.

can clearly be seen in land disputes. As Cheyfitz points out, the relationships of 1823 translated Indian land into property, "legally" transferring the "title" rulings as "domestic dependent nations," thus and designating Indian communities government (xiii). Recent land struggles, such as the is forcibly relocating as many as 13,500 land, involve U.S. government manipula these on-going colonial power rela

a continuing situation of "internal colonialism" establishing land dispute inwhich the government so-called Navajo-Hopi

from what the government has designated Hopi Navajoes and treaties and illustrate tions of traditional Indian relationships tions. See Churchill 14. Smith (152).

accounts of Pocahontas inA True Relation published (1608), A Map of Virginia (1612), Pro in Virginia of the English Colonie of Virginia ceedings (1612), and The Generall Historie (1624). Hamor describes events of her life inA True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia (1615) and in cludes a letter from Rolfe also appends marriage. released a straight-to-video to a New World, on Au II: Journey sequel, Pocahontas in this sequel, but still remains, Iwould argue, the functions differently and journeys to ideology develops. Pocahontas meets Rolfe in Jamestown to Sir Thomas hontas. Hamor Rolfe-Pocahontas Dale, Governor of Virginia, justifying letters from Dale and Alexander Whitaker, another his marriage to Poca the settler, supporting

15. Disney

recently

gust 25,1998. Miscegenation the film's key site at which England

with him; however she goes to speak with the King and negotiate for peace, rather than, as to be an exhibit for the Virginia Company to prove that the English could civi happened historically, an exoti lize conquered savages. A My Fair Lady plotline ensues. Her miscegenated body becomes cized site for the English, and she once again attempts to play the role of peace negotiator and cultural The film ends with Pocahontas and Rolfe sail for Virginia the point at which (significantly, is again deflected. in love, but not married, and they prepare to set she died in real life)?thus the possibility for sexual

mediator.

miscegenation 16. The dominant be summarized

in seventeenth-century view, as encoded anti-miscegenation Virginia an English minister preaching to the Virginia by William Symonds, who forbade interracial sex as "unholy" and "unnatural" (25).

Company

legal history, can settlers

as they embarked, 17. Tilton focus

romances that the popular Pocahontas notes, for example, love for Smith and to marginalize the first to insist on Pocahontas's termarriage was

as "archetypal to Pocahontas from the intermarriage by that time socially taboo as well as legally prohibited,

are of the early nineteenth-century Rolfe. He argues that they shifted in protectress of European men" because and absorption of the Indi

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ans was no longer seen as an option, century (5).

particularly

given

the Indian Removal

policy

of the early to mid

18. The Making Pocahontas in London

Jackson (5-6); Colt. Note that the only portrait of of Pocahontas; Edgerton and Merlock sat for done during her lifetime is an engraving by Simon van de Passe, which Pocahontas her visit there in 1616. during

to this representation is the one native female character who is differentiated from 19. The only exception Pocahontas's best friend Nakoma, who has a simi her peers and associated closely with Pocahontas: lar facial structure but appears slightly younger, pictured with bangs and her hair pulled up. 20. As Valerie In discussing transgresses It indicates Smith itself presents a paradox in terms of racial classification. has argued, racial mixture black body ... both invokes and the idea of passing, Smith argues: "The light-skinned the races and sexes that structure the American the boundaries between social hierarchy. and 'essential' between appearance to be visible" based upon differences presumed racial (45). identity within a system of

a contradiction

racial distinctions 21.

Indian Movement, See also Dippie. Deloria has noted that one problem theAmerican in the beginning in getting an America obsessed with a romanticized Indian be early 1970s, has faced is a difficulty longing to the past to pay attention on the male toAmerican Indian concerns in the present (God is Red 39-56).

22.

See also Mulvey

gaze of cinema. both because as more

23. This miscegenation ideology targeted native women and because colonists saw native women population, glish tailed, some colonists could assimilate

male settler of the predominantly As Tilton has carefully de and later commentators believed that by intermarrying with the Indians, the En and acculturating the Indians by Christianizing them, absorb them racially by assimilable.

them through successive of interracial union, secure their peaceful political generations "whitening" and gradually acquire all of their land through inheritance be cooperation with English settlement, cause in most tribes, land and property were passed down matrilineally. Tilton cites an excellent ex view in the 1757 letter of Virginia Reverend Peter Fontaine ample of this kind of pro-miscegenation would "we ought to have intermarried with them, which exclaims: them effectually, and made of them staunch friends, and, which is of still more consequence, made many of them good Christians"; he significantly adds that if English settlers had intermarried with the Indians, "we should become rightful heirs to their lands" (21-22). the minister us with to his brother, in which have incorporated

See also Kidwell. 24. See Leacock; Leacock and Etienne.

25. Brown, decades Grumet

for example, argues that Powhatan was amassing power for himself during the first two a more patriarchal culture (50). See also Rountree. of the 17th century and was developing societies of the Chesapeake argues that the Coastal Algonquian Bay were slightly more strat

for example, male control of religious au ified than neighboring societies, egalitarian evidencing, in native cultures is a thority (54). The degree to which patriarchal power relations were evident contested issue, complicated by the fact that scholars depend on European accounts as primary docu ments, accounts which are inevitably impacted by a eurocentric and patriarchal bias. See Cheyfitz on Halsey the problematic discuss of cultural mistranslation active colonial efforts in colonial female accounts status to reduce of gender roles and status. Jaimes and in indigenous nations as a way to con

quer target societies 26. The

(Jaimes 319).

Powhatan language became extinct in the 18th century, and the only extant remnants of it are lists inWestern narratives (Goddard 70-78). Disney filmmakers fragments drawn from vocabulary took these remaining fragments and then mixed and matched them with words from other native lan of languages that Pocahon guages, creating a new "hybrid" language (Making). This amalgamation tas speaks mirrors the amalgamation of races that she represents. Cheyfitz provides critical analysis of the politics of language and translation in a colonial context. an extensive

27.

See White

on the concept

of a "middle ground"

of colonial

cultural

relations.

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166

Leigh Edwards

28.

See Edgerton

and Jackson

for an account

of different

contemporary

American

Indian reactions. addresses what he calls

29. AIM AIM's 30. 31.

actually officially called for a boycott of the film (Tillotson "dubious tribal constituencies" (xvi). on the links between the L.A. Riots

C8). Vizenor

See Lowe

and multiculturalism.

to Fish argues: "Boutique multiculturalism is characterized by its superficial or cosmetic relationship the objects of its affection. Boutique multiculturalists admire or appreciate or enjoy or sympathize with or (at the very least) 'recognize the legitimacy of the traditions of cultures other than their own; will but boutique multiculturalists some value at their center generates been either declared ideological or assumed" always stop short of approving other cultures at a point where an act that offends the canons of civilized decency as they have (378).

32. The film's

those who do not, however, mean that resisting readers?including messages are American work to read sub Indian, African American, Asian American, Latina, or white?cannot versive potential feminist voice or her status as a non-white into, for instance, Pocahontas's speaking subject.

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