“Disney’s ‘politically correct’ Pocahontas.” By, Jacqueline Kilpatrick
“Pocahontas;” to many this is merely a Disney film, to others; a historical figure the escapades of whom have been well known and well documented in the diaries of many early Jamestown settlers. The beloved Disney film that recounts a young native woman’s love affair with the handsome colonist James Smith through an empowerment of her character as she saves the foreigner time after time brought a new view of Native Americans and touched the hearts of many young Americans throughout the past few generations. However, for Jacqueline Kilpatrick, the film is little more than an artistic lie that glorifies the relations between Jamestown settlers and the Powhatan people by adjusting the character of Pocahontas and her relationship with James Smith an a pathetic effort to make it more appeasing to the audience. As such, in Kilpatrick’s piece “Disney’s ‘politically correct’ Pocahontas” she reveals the truth of Pocahontas in an attempt to extinguish any and every claim that Disney projected into the minds of the youth about the beginning of America as a nation by dissecting relations between settlers and the Powhatan people in the early 17th century as well as searching for the truth about…show more content… Such as the fact that Pocahontas was not married to John Smith, but rather the “tobacco planter named John Rolfe” before having a kid and dying at the age of twenty-two in an attempt to return home (P.2). Saying that Pocahontas’ knew John Smith could be considered an overstatement as it is more likely that she was “responsible for some trading between settlers,” and to suggest that they had a growing affair is beyond far fetched (P.3). As such, Kilpatrick strongly suggests that putting it in a film is fraudulent to say the