November 26, 2014 • 49 mins
The Pocahontas myth has perpetuated the "Indian Princess" stereotype since the 17th century. Cristen and Caroline explore how this stereotype mangles the true history of Native American women and mythbust the Disney version of Pocahontas.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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(00:44):
Head on over to stuff Mom Never told You dot
spreadshirt dot com and get your sminty swag on. Welcome
to stuff Mom Never Told You From how Stuff Works
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Caroline,
(01:08):
I'm Kristin, and Kristen and I have tackled a whole
lot of cultural stereotypes this year. We've talked about the
spicy Latina stereotype, the issue of calling women exotic and
really what that connotation entails. And today we're going to
turn our attention to a stereotype that exists about a
(01:29):
particular subset of American Indian culture, and that is the
Indian princess stereotype. We want to look at where this
whole stereotype came from, first of all, but also the
effect that it can have on American Indian women today. Yeah,
and I have a feeling that unlike say the spicy
(01:50):
latina stereotype, this one might not be as immediately recognizable,
we might not see it as much in our day
to day pop culture. But it's also partially because of
that that we wanted to talk about it, because this
is a stereotype in particular that really collapses all of
(02:13):
these different cultures. I don't I don't think that many
people even recognize the fact that there are, for instance,
five hundred sixty two federally recognized Native American tribes in
the US, and because a lot of times, for reasons
that we'll talk about in this podcast, we see them
through just this one one image, just one, or at
(02:36):
least we see the women through uh this image. Yeah, Well, so,
I mean there are plenty of stereotypes about Native Americans,
not just women specifically. Historically, they've been portrayed as inferior
to Europeans when Europeans first came to the continent and
just generally inferior to white people. Today today, stereotypes exist
(02:58):
about the fact that, oh, are all alcoholics living on reservations.
They're all lazy, they won't go out and get an
education and get jobs. And on the flip side of
the same stereotype, a lot of people still just assume
that every person of Native American heritage is more spiritual
and wise than anyone else. And while certainly there are
(03:19):
very real issues that happen on reservations in terms of
economic blight, in terms of lower educational attainment, in terms
of them not receiving the same kinds of resources that
Americans elsewhere in the country receive, and because of that
it has produced a lot of problems that do include
(03:41):
things like alcoholism. But it is important to dig back
into the history and see how we have gotten to
this point, um, and we're going to focus in yes
on this Indian princess stereotype. And also to a note
on language. Uh, some people prefer Native Americans, other people
(04:05):
prefer American Indian. The Associated Press style guide, for instance,
recommends American Indian or when whenever possible, actually referring to
someone as their tribe that they are a part of.
So we are going to be using the terms Native
American and American Indian, probably interchangeably throughout this podcast, but
(04:27):
just to note that we have done our research on
that part. Yeah. Well, so, Kristen mentioned the very real
social and economic issues that face a lot of Native Americans,
whether they're on reservations or not today, and a part
of that stems from a lot of the papers we
read talked about the fact that a lot of these
(04:47):
issues stem from a culture of oppression that a lot
of these people's, a lot of these cultures have faced,
and a lot of that in turn stems from the
limitations that are placed on people when you try to
force them into these stereotypical roles, when you don't allow
people to be who they are. And when we looked
(05:08):
at the paper called Debunking the Pocahonist Paradox the Need
for a Humanistic Perspective, they talked the writers talked about
how early European explorers considered Native American Indians the quote
essence of what people would be without Christian and civilized behavior,
and that's both good and bad depending on who's writing
(05:30):
the history at the time, because this perception led a
lot of Europeans to assume that Native Americans were beasts,
they were savages, and they were heathens. But at the
same time that also led later on a little bit
to the perception that American Indians were these noble savages
who were so much more in touch with nature than
the civilized white man. Well, and that also leads into
(05:54):
from the fifteenth century this um perception of, particularly by Europeans,
of American Indians as either good in terms of supporting
their expansionist goals or bad in terms of fighting these
invaders off from their land. And it's just incredible to
(06:14):
see even how through artwork these very Eurocentric ideas of
the savage versus the civilized christian um really plays out
and sort of feeds into this concept of manifest destiny
of oh, you know, we're actually doing a good thing
by coming in here, because we will convert them to Christianity,
(06:35):
we will civilize them, we will take their women and
marry them, and won't that be great? Um. So, even
if you look at early European art depicting Native American women,
these kinds of themes that lead into uh, the Indian
princess stereotype quickly emerge. For instance, there is a mid
(06:55):
nineteenth century painter, he was pretty well known, Alfred Miller,
and he painted all sorts of portraits um portraying American
Indian life. And there is one in particular from eighteen
forty five, the oil painting called the Trapper's Bride, and
in the foreground there's a pocus pocahunta is like woman
(07:17):
who is being handed off, presumably by her father, to
a white trapper. And there's a paper that was reading
about this that called it a symbolic portrayal of the
marriage between civilization and the wilderness, uncivilized woman in need
of domesticating by a civilized white man. And of course
that ties into the greater metaphorical use of this imagery
(07:42):
in terms of representing America or what would be America
as the Native American, the wild and untamed person becoming
tamed and civilized by white men basically. But yeah, he
Alfred Miller also had another painting. I mean, he he
painted all sorts of scenes of the of the frontier
and of the untamed wilderness, and a lot of them
(08:05):
featured half naked Native American women. There was one that
shows a woman swinging from a treety branch and she's
completely topless with just basically a skirt on, and it's,
you know, it's it's open to interpretation as to whether
he actually witnessed anything like that or just chose to
portray Native American women in morally inferior positions to their colonizers.
(08:32):
Um he was. He's been critiqued as using this whole
domestic ideology to create images of Native American women as
domestic moral influencers on the frontiers instead of co contributors
to survival. And it's also worth noting that amid this
background of trying to force these kind of domestic ideologies
onto these people's, pre colonial American Indian societies were for
(08:56):
the most part not male dominated. Yes, there was a
division of labor, gendered division of labor, but a lot
of tribes were actually matrilineal, for instance, including uh the
Modo Pony, of which Pocons was a part of. But
I don't want to get ahead of myself, right, and
so it's interesting though to see this this total manipulation
(09:18):
of what was going on, but manipulating things through art
and and depicting things as being a certain way for
European audiences. And I mean we still see echoes of
that today in our modern media because newcomers to the
quote unquote New World, their experiences with American Indians Native
(09:39):
American people's were really shaped through the quote literary and
visual representations that helped perpetuate stereotypes. And that reminded me
of a point in this paper Our Indian Princess, Subverting
the Stereotype by Nancy Mithlo that jumped out, which said
white images of Natives tell us some more about whites
(10:00):
attitudes and beliefs than about Native realities. And it's it's
notable too that we've been talking for the past few
minutes about art, because that paper Our Indian Princess was
all about Native made art and also often how it's
not so much considered art but more artifact, which also
(10:24):
says a lot again about white's attitudes, right exactly. And
so you know, if if we look at general tropes
about American Indians, and there's a great website all about
this called red face dot Us that's Red dash face
dot Us that goes into all of these tropes and stereotypes,
and they talk about the ones that are specific to men,
(10:45):
like the chief, the noble, savage, UM, the warrior, or
the brave UM. And then they go into the ones
that are specific to women. And there's really two main ones,
the squaw versus the Indian princess. And boy, if we
in modern society do not still have the same arguments
about women in terms of the squaw versus the Indian
(11:07):
princess dichotomy, the whole quiet, subservient serving her husband woman
versus the woman that we consider too strong and maybe
maybe we call her a tramp. Well, and I didn't
realize this. Um. In one of the sources we were reading,
it noted that it was originally um a neutral word
(11:27):
for woman, but it's now often perceived as a derogatory term. Yeah.
And there was another paper that was talking about reclaiming
the words squaw the way that we talk about reclaiming
bitch or reclaiming queer today. While there are definitely languages
that still use squaw and variations of the word squaw
(11:48):
to talk about women or women or female things, animals, whatever, um,
largely in modern society squaw is still considered pretty derogatory. Yeah,
because it's sort of at least according to what we
were reading, it has, in its derogatory sense, become uh
autonomy for a woman's vagina because they're also through this
(12:12):
specific trope. Um. Squaws also were considered sexual servants in
a way for um white men in particular as well.
They were the one They weren't the desirable princesses like
a Pocahontas of legend, but rather um you know, you know,
the women who were just willing to have sex. You
(12:33):
would you would want to have sex with her, but
you wouldn't want to marry her. That whole thing. Yeah.
And and it's interesting to look at the first use
among white Europeans of the words squaw. It's first mentioned
in English by William Bradford and Edward Winslow, who were
describing life in the Plymouth Colony, and they mentioned the
squaw statue or the Massachusetts Queen, Massachusett being an entire
(12:58):
culture of people. Uh um. And I mean that's going
to lead us into talking about the Indian princess, because
by talking about the Massachusetts Queen, these Europeans are framing
Native Americans further as something that more white people could understand,
like here's some language that you fellow Europeans back in
(13:19):
England will understand and be able to get it basically right.
The Indian princess is basically a female equivalent of the
male noble, savage figure that quote unquote good Indian that
the Europeans would talk about and before we get into
more into Poco Hottas, because a lot of it really
(13:41):
stems from her and uh not even really who she
was in reality, but more what her legend became. Um,
this reduces women a lot of times, this Indian princess
stereotype reduces women to helpless maidens or metaphors. Um. We
read a paper about this, call all the Pocahontas Paradox,
(14:01):
a Cautionary Tale for educators, and it says that the
Indian princess stereotype is rooted in the legend of Pocahontas
and it's typically expressed through characters that are maidenly, demure
and deeply committed to some white man. And a lot
of this too is echoing the history portion of our
Spicy Latina podcast, where there is usually that that connection
(14:23):
between the woman of color and her you know, love
and loyalty to white men. Yeah, exactly. And this this
paper was written by Cornell Pewee Wardie, who is an
incredible educator and activist in the Native American community, and
he writes that this, this metaphor, this woman that we're
talking about, she's powerfully symbolic as queen and princess, and
(14:47):
she's been with us since the time that she came
to stand for the quote unquote New World, a term
he says that in and of itself reflects, of course,
at Eurocentric value judgment. But it's interesting to watch the
evolution of these metaphors, the princess and the queens, specifically
getting away from just talking about the squaw as some
(15:08):
basically subservient character in the European imagination. But if we
go back to Terrell Alway, a Guy Heap Portman and
Roger D. Harring, who were the authors of that paper
we talked about earlier debunking the Pocahona's paradox the need
for humanistic perspective, they point out that is early as
fifteen seventy five, artists were interpreting the Indian queen character
(15:32):
as a bare breasted woman who was wearing animal skins
and leaves and jewelry and weapons. She was totally decked
out as this wild thing, and she also was often
depicted with her foot on some sort of dead conquest,
and she was meant to represent not only the abundance
of the New World, but the danger of the new world.
And this then evolved into the image of the Indian princess,
(15:56):
because the longer that white people were in the New World,
all the less scary it became, as they were sort
of conquering people around them and conquering the environment around them,
and this whole Indian princess image. This woman was more
non threatening. She had lighter skin and more romanesque clothes.
She wasn't quite as wild with leaves and animal skin.
(16:18):
She was more draped in a familiar, sort of educated
Greek fashion. She wasn't as much of a warrior, it
sounds like, compared to the Indian queen, and she's absolutely
a precursor to like the lady liberty figure, and she
was often she was often wrapped in like a colonial
flag too, being like, hey, she's like our mascot, well right,
(16:42):
she's bridging the gap between the two cultures. But it's
also though notable that uh, those artistic depictions of the
so called Indian queen that go back to the sixteenth century,
which probably explains why Alfred Miller, in that portrait you
were describing, shows the woman bare breasted swinging from the tree.
(17:03):
She was probably more of a queen, more of a
warrior than this more diminutive princess, right exactly. And so,
just like Kristen and I have talked about with other
issues of stereotypes and racism, these stereotypes basically served to
justify a certain behavior, in this case, justified expansion. And
(17:25):
so a portman inhering right that these stereotypical images of
Indian princesses became instrumental in furthering the cultural domination necessary
to the colonialist enterprise. We've talked before about how perceptions
and racism about black people was used as a way
to justify their enslavement in our country, and so we
(17:47):
see the same attitude here being applied to Native Americans
of all cultures, of all tribes, because it was a
way of being like, oh, well, they don't matter, we
can just shove them out of the way and achieve
our NFS destiny. And once that happens, use her image
as a very popular marketing tool and In our research
(18:08):
for this episode, we found this incredible repository of all
of these different products and even songbooks from the eighteenth
and nineteenth century and even into the twentieth century, using
the image of either the Indian Queen or the Indian
(18:28):
Princess to sell all sorts of products, but especially for
quote unquote natural goods because remember she also has this
spiritual side to her as well. Right, it's just the
whole stereotype of uh, Native Americans being tied closer to
nature than white people, and isn't that cute and so
(18:50):
good for them? But yeah, we have things like the
Victorian era Indian Queen perfume sold by Bean and Brother
in Philadelphia. And then we saw an ad this is
also from the Victorian era for No Water Radium Sanitarium company,
which sold radioactive water largely thought to improve health. This
(19:12):
was like all the health rage back in this time period,
I think, all the way up through the twenties if
I'm not mistaken. But here we see just cartoons basically
imagery of Native American women being used to advertise something
that was supposedly a natural remedy for health. Yeah, and
we find her image on cigars on the nine Swamp
(19:33):
Root Almanac, which was promotional literature for the manufacturers of
the delicious sounding swamp root, which apparently was a quote
great kidney, liver and bladder remedy. So between swamp root
and your radioactive water, you probably feeling tip top. I'm
I'm getting heartburn just thinking about it, right, And then
(19:56):
the very cleverly named Mischief, as in Miss Chief Washington Apples,
and of course the illustration on that was a buxum,
very cartoonish Native American woman. Yeah, and you do see
similar things. They're probably as many products marketed using the
(20:17):
warrior stereotype. The first thing that comes to mind are
the big Chief writing tablets um that you know, kids,
school kids used for years and years and years. And
in addition, of course to this marketing angle, she plays
very well on screen, particularly in Western films, of course, Yeah, definitely,
(20:37):
and it's it's interesting to see the sort of parallels
with the spicy Latina trope. And in six is Duel
in the Sun, the woman character Uh is supposed to
be half Native American and half Hispanic, and of course
she's viewed as a bad girl who gets involved with
two white brothers and ends up stirring up all of
this trouble between them. Um. And then of course you
(20:59):
have nineteen these Broken Arrow in which a young Native
American woman falls head over heels for a white man,
and then Disney. Then there's Disney with Peter Pan and
I had totally forgotten about this until reading up for
this episode. There's Peter Pan and Tiger Lily, and Tiger Lily,
like in the animated feature, she dances for Peter and
(21:22):
then kisses him while the song what Makes the Red
Man Red is playing, And of course when Tiger Lily
kisses Peter, then his cheeks turned very red. And oh,
it's like a whole play on the thing what makes
the Red Man Red? And of course they're then surrounded
by caricature depictions of Native American men, And that's a
(21:45):
criticism that is constant for Disney from uh Peter Pan
through Pocahonas which we're about to talk about, because all
of the caricature, like uh, Native American men in that cartoon,
they all look exactly the same. Whereas you have someone
like Windy and Peter Peter himself, who are white children
(22:07):
whose features are like incredibly detailed in their movements are
incredibly detailed, but then you have what looks like like
basically Hannah Barbera cartoons of Native American men. And it's
one of the same criticisms that surfaced in the nineties
when Disney's Pocahonas came out, because again, like, okay, all
(22:27):
of the Native American people in this movie essentially look
exactly the same. Well, because they're just scenery. Oh and
let's just remember that we have a tendency to collapse
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tribes just into one,
one poorly drawn image. I mean, yeah, exactly, And so
(22:47):
of course this brings us to Pocahonas. Um Pocahona is
the animated feature exactly. Yes, important note, right. The Disney
Pokehontist figure who in the movie V is a beautiful
young woman who saves and then falls in love with
the strapping John Smith rather than marry a man from
(23:09):
her own tribe, And of course she's portrayed as this buxom,
fully grown adult woman in tune with nature and animals.
And of course, in researching I wanted to appropriately researched
for this episode, so naturally I went back and watched
a ton of clips from the movie, and I got that, like,
you know, that very specific like full body, hot, sweaty
(23:32):
feeling that you get when you're so embarrassed for someone else,
Like I got that watching those clips because it's horrifying.
I have not seen that movie since I was a
kid and it was out in theaters. And of course
when you're a kid, you don't think anything of it.
You're like, oh, yeah, that's what Indians are like. Um,
but I mean there's literally a scene for those of
(23:52):
you who don't know or don't remember, there's literally a
scene when Pocahonas encounters John Smith for the first time.
They haven't spoken. He's a stranger. She can't speak English
and he can't speak her language, and she is surrounded
by this magical, glittery rainbow wind and suddenly she can
speak English and perfectly. And it's it's weird, and a
(24:15):
lot of people makes sense take issue with it. But Caroline,
I mean the thing I don't think you're getting because Caroline,
have you ever heard the wolf cry to a bluecorn moon? What? Well,
deeper question? What is a bluecorn moon? I don't know.
I might be getting the lyrics wrong. Horn Moon William horne.
(24:35):
Who's to say, yeah, it could be a blue corn
blue horn. Um or Or asked the grinning Bobcat why
he grins, Well, I just talked to my raccoon friend
that follows me around everywhere. I mean, I will say
that when this movie came out, the feature film my
mother was, she was not about to let me see
(24:57):
it because, in her words, is revisionist history. He's revision's history.
But more I think she took issue with the fact
that Pocons was not talking to a tree. She could
not talk to trees. So so that was my that
was my Pokehonta's history. But we do want to uh
correct that revisionist history. Let's revise that revisionist history. When
(25:19):
we come right back from a quick break and talk
about who Pokehonas really was. And now back to the show.
So before we took a break, we were talking about, well,
my mother's this taste for revision's history and Disney animated
feature films. But more importantly, um, we need to talk
(25:42):
about though, the very real truth of how this legend
of Pocahonas which snowballed into this Disney film and the
follow up film. There was a follow up of Pocahona
st where they were like sorry about that, but was
even worse they didn't really correct anything. Um, But we
(26:04):
need to talk about how this so called Pocahontas paradox,
as academics call it today, has served, you know, really
too mold a more European understanding of Native American women.
We really see Native American women a lot of times
through this Pocahontas lens. And you know, we should explain
(26:26):
that the Pocahontas paradox what it is, because we've mentioned
it several times since it is in the name of
several studies we've cited. But it's the same thing as
the Princess squad dilemma or the Prince's prostitute syndrome, or
as you might know it, the Madonna Wore paradox as well.
But it's basically combining the stereotypes of the beautiful, exotic,
(26:47):
lustful woman and the dangerous, strong, powerful woman. It's basically
a lot of fears about women. Yeah, and not to
turn this into an episode of stuff you missed in
history class, but we need to do our due diligence
of just ironing out what really happened. Um. First of all,
Pocahonas was from the Moto Pony tribe. And by the way,
(27:11):
Pocahonas was not actually her name. It was a Powertan
nickname meaning the naughty one or spoiled child. And her
personal name was mata Waca or Matoa, and she also
had a public name of Amnute, and she was the
daughter of Chief Powertin. But it's also important to remember
too that Chief Patin was not a king, which means
(27:33):
that po was not a princess. Although with the Moto
Pony tribe the chieftain power was matrilineal. However, Pocahonas would
not have been the next in line. It would have
been one of it would have been a brother still
getting the being handed the chief torch, which is also
(27:55):
which is also not how things work. I am now
mangling history yet again. Hot at every turn we're running
into hurdles. But okay, so there is a definite questionable
time frame here, because you know, we mentioned that in
the Disney movie she is a fully developed adult woman
who falls in love with John Smith. But actually in
(28:17):
the time that Pocahonas and her family encountered John Smith
in seven, Pocahonas actually would have been about ten or
eleven years old, and the whole circumstance by which she
first meets him is still something that historians and anthropologists
are trying to figure out. There's still a lot of
(28:38):
theories about how they initially encountered each other. Now, of course,
as the legend goes, which John Smith wrote years after
Pocahonas died, um, he says that she essentially rescued him
from being killed by Chief Powaton. And that's probably not
(29:00):
what happened at all. I mean, there there's a chance
that perhaps there was a ceremonial introduction happening and she
interrupted it. Because there's also a good chance that she
would not have had like it would not have been
her role to be in that place at that time. Um. Yeah,
all sorts of things that could have happened. But John
(29:21):
Smith is not the most reliable narrator for this story. Yeah,
because the whole thing is that he wrote this account
of spending a winter with this group of people, um,
and the account didn't mention anything of the sort about
a rescue. It wasn't until seventeen years later that he
wrote the follow up account, and historians basically say, like, yeah,
(29:44):
there was a pre existing story about a Native American
young woman who did help out a white guy at
some point, So he could have stolen the story because
it sounded good, or he could have actually been helped
out by old Pocahonas, But either way, it's possible that
he was just trying to make his way as a
(30:05):
writer of New World adventures after it was pretty clear
that because he was such a jerk, he wouldn't actually
be going back there to make his fortune. Well, and
it would have furnished his image because by this time
Pocahonas was well known because she had, you know, been
to Europe and made this huge impression. So how convenient
for him to be like, oh, bt Dubbs, she actually, uh,
(30:26):
she rescued me. So yeah. But in sixteen twelve, then
seventeen year old Pocohonas, who was married at the time.
She was married to a Palatin named Kakum, who in
the Disney movie is portrayed as a violent, savage creature
who she chooses John Smith over by the way um
(30:49):
she's married, she's taken prisoner by Jamestown residents on a
ship for more than a year, and while she was captive,
she meets John Rawle, who is twenty eight already a
widower because it is sixteen twelve, and he takes an
interest in her. Some sorts to say that, yeah, the
feelings were mutual. Um. But in the process she converts
(31:13):
to Christianity. She's baptized under the name Rebecca and Mary's Rolf.
And this is a huge deal for the Europeans because
this means that the now renamed Rebecca Rolf is the
first American Indian woman on record to marry a white
guy and even more importantly, convert to Christianity. What a
(31:37):
prime example of how these Europeans are bringing civilization to
the quote unquote New World. And she made such a
splash in sixteen sixteen when she and her husband traveled
to England because she captured their imaginations. She was the
New World equivalent of a princess. Here's this woman who
(31:58):
has been made rafa end and civilized by the civilizing
influence of her white husband. But she's also the daughter
of the Indian equivalent of a king right well, which
also justified Ralph marrying her because a lot of people
still were horrified at the thought of that kind of
(32:19):
racial intermingling. Too, so that the Indian princes stereotype also
served that role. Yeah, but so in England she was
used in the Virginia Company of London's campaigns to get
people to move to the New World. And of course
she eased people's fears because oh, well, she's in a
ball gown or a big, you know, fancy dress, just
(32:40):
like I am. So clearly she's not that savage. But
the story does not have a happy ending, as one
might imagine. In sixteen seventeen, she got very ill on
the way back to America, and when they basically turned
around and came back to England to get her help,
she ended up dying at the age of twenty one.
(33:01):
And well, she probably died of something that I'm sure
a lot of people died of at the time, possibly pneumonia, tuberculosis,
or some type of smallpox. Contemporary reports of the day,
tying in with this whole legend and the whole stereotyping,
said that she died of a broken heart. Oh goodness,
it was probably likelier smallpox or just living in uh,
(33:22):
sixteen seventeen, because remember too, by the time Ralph meets
hero at twenty eight, he's already a widower. Um. But
it's just incredible that that rather tragic, not tragic to
the point of say Sarky Bartman, who we talked about
in our episode on fat Bottomed Girls, um, but still someone,
(33:44):
you know, this woman of color being shipped off to
Europe specifically to be used kind of put on display
in a way. And if you look at drawings and
depictions of her um from Save the seventeen d eighteen hundreds,
it is very disnified already because it's her with very
(34:05):
long lashes, she has um, you know, very she's very attractive.
She's wearing a ballgown, but also she's wearing a headdress.
So it's like the melding of these two, these two cultures. Yeah.
And so of course, now that we have told you
the true story with a sad ending, let's look back
at Disney and what the cartoon version did in terms
(34:28):
of furthering stereotypes, because we already mentioned Pocahon's near magical
powers thanks to her of course, because she's an Indian,
her super amazing connection with nature, and of course the
furthering of the stereotype totally serves to disconnect her from
the actual human person that we've just told you she was, well,
(34:50):
and there's the whole thing too with falling in love
with the first white man. She sees that's a common
um trope within a trope, and Perety, who we cited earlier,
said that quote. Disney has created a marketable new age
pocahonist to embody our millennial dreams for wholeness and harmony
while banishing our nightmares of savagery and emptiness. In this regard,
(35:14):
how Indian women are portrayed in the movies is an
extension of White America's attempt to cope with a sense
of cultural guilt. And that also reminds me of that
paper by Nancy myth Flow, Our Indian Princess, in which
she interviews a lot of Native American artists, and one
of whom was talking about how um everyone She's like,
(35:34):
everyone always wants me to paint the warrior chief on
a horse, and of course I never am going to
I'm never going to do that because it's you know,
fulfilling this image. Although there are some days when I
am hungry and I need money, and I consider, you know,
how how quickly could I paint that horse? How quickly
(35:55):
could I do that? Because it is all of this.
It ties into all of this imagery God, and it
goes back to that Arthur Miller guy who was just
painting images of the savage Native people's, you know, all
of them running around without clothes on and being sinful. Well,
and even farther back to because Sydney, say fifteventy five
(36:16):
when we first see those, uh, those paintings of the
Indian Queen. And there's a lot of conversation about art
in this because it is important because kind of like
from our Women Explorers episode where you have the botanist
sitting there painting these flowers because obviously Google image did
not exist, photography what did not exist, and so you
(36:37):
relied on art to see these these new worlds. Yeah,
and I mean this ties together so many things we've
talked about because just like in our Spicy Latina episode
where we talked about what modern media is doing four
stereotypes of Latino women, it's the same thing. It's just
not it's not primetime TV obviously, but it's paintings and
(36:59):
lithographs and rawings and journal accounts that are going back
to England to inform people's image and their thought process
about what the new world was like and so for
a lot of people, that meant that it was a wild,
scary place full of savage, sinful people who walked around
(37:19):
without shirts on. Yeah. And and the unfortunate thing is
I have noticed that a lot of people, especially like
a lot of Americans today who are not native American,
we're not American Indians, often tend to greet these kinds
of conversations with an eye roll of like, oh, well,
(37:40):
here we go again about the American Indians. Yeah, we know,
we know, and or whenever, for instance, there are conversations about, hey,
that that stereotypical kind of racist mascot. We might not
want to use that anymore. People, You know what, It's
just a mascot, Come on, um, but it's actually no
(38:02):
just being wilfully ignorant of history and why it's just
strange that we are so a lot a lot of
people are so um intensely defensive of wearing blinders to it,
right exactly. And so that leads us to our next
point about how these stereotypes affect our kids. Because we
mentioned at the top of the podcast that there are
very real issues, social issues, economic issues affecting a lot
(38:26):
of American Indians today, and a lot of times that
starts with children because, uh pe, we already argues that
this whole stereotyping issue is part of a larger miseducation
of all of our children, both Native and otherwise, because
you have non Native children who developed these stereotypes of
the continents, aboriginal inhabitants um and Native American children being
(38:51):
presented with confusing reflections and interpretations of their own cultures.
Because you know how many people are going to go
out and serve which of the truth in terms of like,
especially with non Native people. I mean, you're gonna be
presented with a stereotype or a story about Christopher Columbus
and you're going to be like, well, I don't know
how else to get a different version of things. So cool. Yeah,
(39:15):
And we read a study from two thousand eight in
the Basic and Applied Social Psychology Journal looking at the
psychological impacts of American Indian sports mascots on Native American kids,
and what was interesting about the finding was that the
students themselves reported positive associations with these actual mascots, but
(39:36):
at the same time reported depressed state self esteem and
community worth. Because even though we might see these mascots.
I mean, Caroline, let's go ahead and identify the elephant
in the room, which is the fact that we live
in Atlanta and our baseball team, our beloved hometown team,
are the Atlanta Braves, and we have a mascot called
(39:58):
Chief Nakahoma. That's not okay? And do I do the
tomahawk chops sometimes? Yeah, And that's probably not okay. Um,
because these might seem like just fun kinds of fandom things,
but they clearly in the process of collapsing these cultures
and limiting the of what kids kind of can see
(40:21):
themselves in leads to that, you know, the lowered self esteem. Yeah.
And so the writers of that study said that basically
American Indian mascots are harmful because they remind American Indians
of the limited ways that others see them and in
this way constrain how they can see themselves. And it's
(40:41):
in it's things like this that are especially in sidious,
especially when you look at girls in particular. Teresa la
FROMBOS did some research into Native American adolescents and found
that girls were six times more likely to be sexually
abused than boys. They're more prone to depression and more
(41:02):
likely to be suicidal with higher incidents of alcohol abuse,
and she writes the impact of the welfare culture and
the losses can be identified at the individual level by
feelings of victimization attributable to racism and stereotyping, value conflicts
or confusion, isolation, and oppression. She writes, unresolved grief over
(41:23):
losses and effects of ongoing cultural genocide are often presented
by clients in the form of chronic cycles of crisis
and oppression. So what do we do? I mean, that's heavy?
What do we How do we? Is it possible to
even fix that? And fix seems like too simple of
a word. Yeah, well, I mean, so we've presented here
that the a lot of the issue is how children
(41:44):
see themselves and the image that they see reflected back
when they turn on the on the television, and so
pee wee reready that educator activist author calls on his
fellow teachers, for instance, to encourage reflective exploration of this
and other dimensions of multicultural education. Basically, get in on
the ground level, show kids that there are so many
(42:07):
multifaceted cultures out there, that it's not just pocahonas and
the majestic Indian chief well. And this also brings up
a quote from Wilma Mankiller, who we did a podcast
on a long time ago. Um, she was the first
woman to lead the Chaerokee nation, and she said quote
the appalling lack of accurate information about Indigenous women fuels
(42:31):
negative stereotypes. Television, film, and print media often portray Indigenous
women as a sexual drudges, the squaw, or innocent children
of nature. The power, strength, and complexity of Indigenous women
are rarely acknowledged or even recognized, probably because of these
very stereotypes we've been talking about, and I mean so
(42:51):
tying all of the harm that these stereotypes can do
back to education, I mean, Pewee Aready basically addresses the
fact that there's so much to learn and to unlearn.
And my thought about it in reading all of these
sources was that it's good to remember that history tends
(43:12):
to be the stories of the winner, the conqueror the
person who won the war. And so even though we
have things like matrilineal cultures in Native American societies and
women holding important roles in positions, the European men who
came over wouldn't have even noticed or cared, or they
(43:32):
wouldn't have wanted it reflected and sent back to their
families in England. And so a lot of the histories
that we hear focus only on men, and not only
on just men, but on the noble savage. And so
the more we can learn about both women in all
of these various cultures, and the more that we can
focus on the fact that these were real, actual three
(43:55):
dimensional humans, I think the better will be. Yeah, And
this is probably with the point where we need to
do a follow up episode at some point to actually
talk about those women, you know, to highlight Native American
women both from history and today who have helped shape
(44:15):
these tribes and these cultures and who are still working
every day to advocate on behalf of them and on
behalf of you know, people outside of their tribes as well.
But this is where we have to wrap up today.
So really curious to hear from listeners about this. If
(44:35):
there are any American Indians listening, anyone who has any
insights direct insights into this Indian princess stereotype, we'd love
to hear from you. Mom Stuff at how stuff works
dot Com is our email address you can also tweet
us at moms a podcast, or messages on Facebook. And
we've got a couple of messages to share with you
right now. Okay, I have a letter here from Judith
(45:02):
about our Girl Gangs episode. She says, I really enjoyed it,
but I had a few thoughts after listening. I really
thought that this topic could have been expanded. I know
you guys have constraints sometimes. This is probably a whole
other topic. There are women like Griselle de Blanco, who
was a famous drug lord of the Median cartel and
one of the first in the cocaine trade of Miami
during the seventies. She was also known as the Black
(45:24):
Widow she killed her ex husband's, the cocaine godmother, and
the queen of narco trafficking. If you look at places
like Baltimore and d C. There's been an uptick in
recent years in girl gangs, even as recently as this
past week when headlines were made in Baltimore. Also, many
gangs that are formed by women are not necessarily for
offensive means, but for defense, like in the Pink Sorry
(45:47):
gang in India, which was created to protect women from
domestic violence and abuse of all sorts. Or the gang
of women in Mexico that are protecting others from violent cartels,
and while not necessarily an organized gang, you also have
Diana the Hunter Nuarez, who again protects victims of rape
and abuse. Like I said, I'm a big fan of
the podcast. I just thought the topic could have been
fleshed out more along the lines of race, especially in class.
(46:10):
Thanks guys, and thank you Judith. Um. You bring up
some really excellent points. Um. You know, we we were
focusing more on like a specific subset of the whole
gang issue, but I love your ideas and suggestions, so
thank you. Well. I've got a letter here from Meredith
with the incredible subject line quote they that die mades
will leap apes in Hell? Or why our culture is
(46:34):
anti spinsters? She writes. I teach British literature at a
community college in Texas, and while preparing for a class,
I wrote a poem by Catherine Phillips, a cool lady
who wrote a married state. Her last line sent me
on a j store spiral to understand what was going on.
I came across an old article about the quote and
the subject line of this email and what exactly it meant.
(46:57):
It really shed some interesting light on our cultural aversion
to spinsterhood or virginity in general. The article argues that
it's all because of the English Reformation and the need
for the Protestants and Henry the Eighth, as well as
his children Edward and Elizabeth, to distance the English population
from quote the Popish practice of celibacy by basically denouncing
(47:17):
all celibates as heading directly for Hell, and that quote
he who vows chastity is an infidel. At first, it
seems to be about both men and women who vow chastity,
but as so many unpleasant religious and cultural things do,
it eventually shifts to the idea that maids are the
one who will be doomed to leap apes around Hell.
As religious celibacy ends in fifteen thirty six, the need
(47:40):
to tar priests with this brush ends, and since male
virginity is so often seen as a joke and also improbable,
but female virginity is a threat to the order of things,
it begins to be associated with the social and economic
burden of old maids. Although luckily this saying is now obsolete,
it seems to reflect and strengthen the fears are culture
(48:00):
has had for so long of spinsterhood. I find it
frustrating and also fascinating that this symbol virginity can be
at first upheld as an ideal and then disparage as
something foolish and dangerous. Just another example of an impossible
dichotomy for women do live up to. So thank you
Meredith for that fascinating insight from and she even included
(48:23):
her journal citation from the Journal of American Folklore. And
if you have any journal citations to send our way
or just wanna let us know your thoughts, Mom, stop
at House of Works dot com is our email address
and for links to all of our social media as
well as all of our blogs, videos and podcasts, including
this one with our sources so you can learn more,
(48:44):
perhaps about the true history of Pocahona's. Head on over
to stuff Mom Never Told You dot com for moralness
and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff Works
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Head on over to stuff Mom Never told You dot
spreadshirt dot com and get your sminty swag on. Welcome
to stuff Mom Never Told You From how Stuff Works
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Caroline,
(01:08):
I'm Kristin, and Kristen and I have tackled a whole
lot of cultural stereotypes this year. We've talked about the
spicy Latina stereotype, the issue of calling women exotic and
really what that connotation entails. And today we're going to
turn our attention to a stereotype that exists about a
(01:29):
particular subset of American Indian culture, and that is the
Indian princess stereotype. We want to look at where this
whole stereotype came from, first of all, but also the
effect that it can have on American Indian women today. Yeah,
and I have a feeling that unlike say the spicy
(01:50):
latina stereotype, this one might not be as immediately recognizable,
we might not see it as much in our day
to day pop culture. But it's also partially because of
that that we wanted to talk about it, because this
is a stereotype in particular that really collapses all of
(02:13):
these different cultures. I don't I don't think that many
people even recognize the fact that there are, for instance,
five hundred sixty two federally recognized Native American tribes in
the US, and because a lot of times, for reasons
that we'll talk about in this podcast, we see them
through just this one one image, just one, or at
(02:36):
least we see the women through uh this image. Yeah, Well, so,
I mean there are plenty of stereotypes about Native Americans,
not just women specifically. Historically, they've been portrayed as inferior
to Europeans when Europeans first came to the continent and
just generally inferior to white people. Today today, stereotypes exist
(02:58):
about the fact that, oh, are all alcoholics living on reservations.
They're all lazy, they won't go out and get an
education and get jobs. And on the flip side of
the same stereotype, a lot of people still just assume
that every person of Native American heritage is more spiritual
and wise than anyone else. And while certainly there are
(03:19):
very real issues that happen on reservations in terms of
economic blight, in terms of lower educational attainment, in terms
of them not receiving the same kinds of resources that
Americans elsewhere in the country receive, and because of that
it has produced a lot of problems that do include
(03:41):
things like alcoholism. But it is important to dig back
into the history and see how we have gotten to
this point, um, and we're going to focus in yes
on this Indian princess stereotype. And also to a note
on language. Uh, some people prefer Native Americans, other people
(04:05):
prefer American Indian. The Associated Press style guide, for instance,
recommends American Indian or when whenever possible, actually referring to
someone as their tribe that they are a part of.
So we are going to be using the terms Native
American and American Indian, probably interchangeably throughout this podcast, but
(04:27):
just to note that we have done our research on
that part. Yeah. Well, so, Kristen mentioned the very real
social and economic issues that face a lot of Native Americans,
whether they're on reservations or not today, and a part
of that stems from a lot of the papers we
read talked about the fact that a lot of these
(04:47):
issues stem from a culture of oppression that a lot
of these people's, a lot of these cultures have faced,
and a lot of that in turn stems from the
limitations that are placed on people when you try to
force them into these stereotypical roles, when you don't allow
people to be who they are. And when we looked
(05:08):
at the paper called Debunking the Pocahonist Paradox the Need
for a Humanistic Perspective, they talked the writers talked about
how early European explorers considered Native American Indians the quote
essence of what people would be without Christian and civilized behavior,
and that's both good and bad depending on who's writing
(05:30):
the history at the time, because this perception led a
lot of Europeans to assume that Native Americans were beasts,
they were savages, and they were heathens. But at the
same time that also led later on a little bit
to the perception that American Indians were these noble savages
who were so much more in touch with nature than
the civilized white man. Well, and that also leads into
(05:54):
from the fifteenth century this um perception of, particularly by Europeans,
of American Indians as either good in terms of supporting
their expansionist goals or bad in terms of fighting these
invaders off from their land. And it's just incredible to
(06:14):
see even how through artwork these very Eurocentric ideas of
the savage versus the civilized christian um really plays out
and sort of feeds into this concept of manifest destiny
of oh, you know, we're actually doing a good thing
by coming in here, because we will convert them to Christianity,
(06:35):
we will civilize them, we will take their women and
marry them, and won't that be great? Um. So, even
if you look at early European art depicting Native American women,
these kinds of themes that lead into uh, the Indian
princess stereotype quickly emerge. For instance, there is a mid
(06:55):
nineteenth century painter, he was pretty well known, Alfred Miller,
and he painted all sorts of portraits um portraying American
Indian life. And there is one in particular from eighteen
forty five, the oil painting called the Trapper's Bride, and
in the foreground there's a pocus pocahunta is like woman
(07:17):
who is being handed off, presumably by her father, to
a white trapper. And there's a paper that was reading
about this that called it a symbolic portrayal of the
marriage between civilization and the wilderness, uncivilized woman in need
of domesticating by a civilized white man. And of course
that ties into the greater metaphorical use of this imagery
(07:42):
in terms of representing America or what would be America
as the Native American, the wild and untamed person becoming
tamed and civilized by white men basically. But yeah, he
Alfred Miller also had another painting. I mean, he he
painted all sorts of scenes of the of the frontier
and of the untamed wilderness, and a lot of them
(08:05):
featured half naked Native American women. There was one that
shows a woman swinging from a treety branch and she's
completely topless with just basically a skirt on, and it's,
you know, it's it's open to interpretation as to whether
he actually witnessed anything like that or just chose to
portray Native American women in morally inferior positions to their colonizers.
(08:32):
Um he was. He's been critiqued as using this whole
domestic ideology to create images of Native American women as
domestic moral influencers on the frontiers instead of co contributors
to survival. And it's also worth noting that amid this
background of trying to force these kind of domestic ideologies
onto these people's, pre colonial American Indian societies were for
(08:56):
the most part not male dominated. Yes, there was a
division of labor, gendered division of labor, but a lot
of tribes were actually matrilineal, for instance, including uh the
Modo Pony, of which Pocons was a part of. But
I don't want to get ahead of myself, right, and
so it's interesting though to see this this total manipulation
(09:18):
of what was going on, but manipulating things through art
and and depicting things as being a certain way for
European audiences. And I mean we still see echoes of
that today in our modern media because newcomers to the
quote unquote New World, their experiences with American Indians Native
(09:39):
American people's were really shaped through the quote literary and
visual representations that helped perpetuate stereotypes. And that reminded me
of a point in this paper Our Indian Princess, Subverting
the Stereotype by Nancy Mithlo that jumped out, which said
white images of Natives tell us some more about whites
(10:00):
attitudes and beliefs than about Native realities. And it's it's
notable too that we've been talking for the past few
minutes about art, because that paper Our Indian Princess was
all about Native made art and also often how it's
not so much considered art but more artifact, which also
(10:24):
says a lot again about white's attitudes, right exactly. And
so you know, if if we look at general tropes
about American Indians, and there's a great website all about
this called red face dot Us that's Red dash face
dot Us that goes into all of these tropes and stereotypes,
and they talk about the ones that are specific to men,
(10:45):
like the chief, the noble, savage, UM, the warrior, or
the brave UM. And then they go into the ones
that are specific to women. And there's really two main ones,
the squaw versus the Indian princess. And boy, if we
in modern society do not still have the same arguments
about women in terms of the squaw versus the Indian
(11:07):
princess dichotomy, the whole quiet, subservient serving her husband woman
versus the woman that we consider too strong and maybe
maybe we call her a tramp. Well, and I didn't
realize this. Um. In one of the sources we were reading,
it noted that it was originally um a neutral word
(11:27):
for woman, but it's now often perceived as a derogatory term. Yeah.
And there was another paper that was talking about reclaiming
the words squaw the way that we talk about reclaiming
bitch or reclaiming queer today. While there are definitely languages
that still use squaw and variations of the word squaw
(11:48):
to talk about women or women or female things, animals, whatever, um,
largely in modern society squaw is still considered pretty derogatory. Yeah,
because it's sort of at least according to what we
were reading, it has, in its derogatory sense, become uh
autonomy for a woman's vagina because they're also through this
(12:12):
specific trope. Um. Squaws also were considered sexual servants in
a way for um white men in particular as well.
They were the one They weren't the desirable princesses like
a Pocahontas of legend, but rather um you know, you know,
the women who were just willing to have sex. You
(12:33):
would you would want to have sex with her, but
you wouldn't want to marry her. That whole thing. Yeah.
And and it's interesting to look at the first use
among white Europeans of the words squaw. It's first mentioned
in English by William Bradford and Edward Winslow, who were
describing life in the Plymouth Colony, and they mentioned the
squaw statue or the Massachusetts Queen, Massachusett being an entire
(12:58):
culture of people. Uh um. And I mean that's going
to lead us into talking about the Indian princess, because
by talking about the Massachusetts Queen, these Europeans are framing
Native Americans further as something that more white people could understand,
like here's some language that you fellow Europeans back in
(13:19):
England will understand and be able to get it basically right.
The Indian princess is basically a female equivalent of the
male noble, savage figure that quote unquote good Indian that
the Europeans would talk about and before we get into
more into Poco Hottas, because a lot of it really
(13:41):
stems from her and uh not even really who she
was in reality, but more what her legend became. Um,
this reduces women a lot of times, this Indian princess
stereotype reduces women to helpless maidens or metaphors. Um. We
read a paper about this, call all the Pocahontas Paradox,
(14:01):
a Cautionary Tale for educators, and it says that the
Indian princess stereotype is rooted in the legend of Pocahontas
and it's typically expressed through characters that are maidenly, demure
and deeply committed to some white man. And a lot
of this too is echoing the history portion of our
Spicy Latina podcast, where there is usually that that connection
(14:23):
between the woman of color and her you know, love
and loyalty to white men. Yeah, exactly. And this this
paper was written by Cornell Pewee Wardie, who is an
incredible educator and activist in the Native American community, and
he writes that this, this metaphor, this woman that we're
talking about, she's powerfully symbolic as queen and princess, and
(14:47):
she's been with us since the time that she came
to stand for the quote unquote New World, a term
he says that in and of itself reflects, of course,
at Eurocentric value judgment. But it's interesting to watch the
evolution of these metaphors, the princess and the queens, specifically
getting away from just talking about the squaw as some
(15:08):
basically subservient character in the European imagination. But if we
go back to Terrell Alway, a Guy Heap Portman and
Roger D. Harring, who were the authors of that paper
we talked about earlier debunking the Pocahona's paradox the need
for humanistic perspective, they point out that is early as
fifteen seventy five, artists were interpreting the Indian queen character
(15:32):
as a bare breasted woman who was wearing animal skins
and leaves and jewelry and weapons. She was totally decked
out as this wild thing, and she also was often
depicted with her foot on some sort of dead conquest,
and she was meant to represent not only the abundance
of the New World, but the danger of the new world.
And this then evolved into the image of the Indian princess,
(15:56):
because the longer that white people were in the New World,
all the less scary it became, as they were sort
of conquering people around them and conquering the environment around them,
and this whole Indian princess image. This woman was more
non threatening. She had lighter skin and more romanesque clothes.
She wasn't quite as wild with leaves and animal skin.
(16:18):
She was more draped in a familiar, sort of educated
Greek fashion. She wasn't as much of a warrior, it
sounds like, compared to the Indian queen, and she's absolutely
a precursor to like the lady liberty figure, and she
was often she was often wrapped in like a colonial
flag too, being like, hey, she's like our mascot, well right,
(16:42):
she's bridging the gap between the two cultures. But it's
also though notable that uh, those artistic depictions of the
so called Indian queen that go back to the sixteenth century,
which probably explains why Alfred Miller, in that portrait you
were describing, shows the woman bare breasted swinging from the tree.
(17:03):
She was probably more of a queen, more of a
warrior than this more diminutive princess, right exactly. And so,
just like Kristen and I have talked about with other
issues of stereotypes and racism, these stereotypes basically served to
justify a certain behavior, in this case, justified expansion. And
(17:25):
so a portman inhering right that these stereotypical images of
Indian princesses became instrumental in furthering the cultural domination necessary
to the colonialist enterprise. We've talked before about how perceptions
and racism about black people was used as a way
to justify their enslavement in our country, and so we
(17:47):
see the same attitude here being applied to Native Americans
of all cultures, of all tribes, because it was a
way of being like, oh, well, they don't matter, we
can just shove them out of the way and achieve
our NFS destiny. And once that happens, use her image
as a very popular marketing tool and In our research
(18:08):
for this episode, we found this incredible repository of all
of these different products and even songbooks from the eighteenth
and nineteenth century and even into the twentieth century, using
the image of either the Indian Queen or the Indian
(18:28):
Princess to sell all sorts of products, but especially for
quote unquote natural goods because remember she also has this
spiritual side to her as well. Right, it's just the
whole stereotype of uh, Native Americans being tied closer to
nature than white people, and isn't that cute and so
(18:50):
good for them? But yeah, we have things like the
Victorian era Indian Queen perfume sold by Bean and Brother
in Philadelphia. And then we saw an ad this is
also from the Victorian era for No Water Radium Sanitarium company,
which sold radioactive water largely thought to improve health. This
(19:12):
was like all the health rage back in this time period,
I think, all the way up through the twenties if
I'm not mistaken. But here we see just cartoons basically
imagery of Native American women being used to advertise something
that was supposedly a natural remedy for health. Yeah, and
we find her image on cigars on the nine Swamp
(19:33):
Root Almanac, which was promotional literature for the manufacturers of
the delicious sounding swamp root, which apparently was a quote
great kidney, liver and bladder remedy. So between swamp root
and your radioactive water, you probably feeling tip top. I'm
I'm getting heartburn just thinking about it, right, And then
(19:56):
the very cleverly named Mischief, as in Miss Chief Washington Apples,
and of course the illustration on that was a buxum,
very cartoonish Native American woman. Yeah, and you do see
similar things. They're probably as many products marketed using the
(20:17):
warrior stereotype. The first thing that comes to mind are
the big Chief writing tablets um that you know, kids,
school kids used for years and years and years. And
in addition, of course to this marketing angle, she plays
very well on screen, particularly in Western films, of course, Yeah, definitely,
(20:37):
and it's it's interesting to see the sort of parallels
with the spicy Latina trope. And in six is Duel
in the Sun, the woman character Uh is supposed to
be half Native American and half Hispanic, and of course
she's viewed as a bad girl who gets involved with
two white brothers and ends up stirring up all of
this trouble between them. Um. And then of course you
(20:59):
have nineteen these Broken Arrow in which a young Native
American woman falls head over heels for a white man,
and then Disney. Then there's Disney with Peter Pan and
I had totally forgotten about this until reading up for
this episode. There's Peter Pan and Tiger Lily, and Tiger Lily,
like in the animated feature, she dances for Peter and
(21:22):
then kisses him while the song what Makes the Red
Man Red is playing, And of course when Tiger Lily
kisses Peter, then his cheeks turned very red. And oh,
it's like a whole play on the thing what makes
the Red Man Red? And of course they're then surrounded
by caricature depictions of Native American men, And that's a
(21:45):
criticism that is constant for Disney from uh Peter Pan
through Pocahonas which we're about to talk about, because all
of the caricature, like uh, Native American men in that cartoon,
they all look exactly the same. Whereas you have someone
like Windy and Peter Peter himself, who are white children
(22:07):
whose features are like incredibly detailed in their movements are
incredibly detailed, but then you have what looks like like
basically Hannah Barbera cartoons of Native American men. And it's
one of the same criticisms that surfaced in the nineties
when Disney's Pocahonas came out, because again, like, okay, all
(22:27):
of the Native American people in this movie essentially look
exactly the same. Well, because they're just scenery. Oh and
let's just remember that we have a tendency to collapse
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tribes just into one,
one poorly drawn image. I mean, yeah, exactly, And so
(22:47):
of course this brings us to Pocahonas. Um Pocahona is
the animated feature exactly. Yes, important note, right. The Disney
Pokehontist figure who in the movie V is a beautiful
young woman who saves and then falls in love with
the strapping John Smith rather than marry a man from
(23:09):
her own tribe, And of course she's portrayed as this buxom,
fully grown adult woman in tune with nature and animals.
And of course, in researching I wanted to appropriately researched
for this episode, so naturally I went back and watched
a ton of clips from the movie, and I got that, like,
you know, that very specific like full body, hot, sweaty
(23:32):
feeling that you get when you're so embarrassed for someone else,
Like I got that watching those clips because it's horrifying.
I have not seen that movie since I was a
kid and it was out in theaters. And of course
when you're a kid, you don't think anything of it.
You're like, oh, yeah, that's what Indians are like. Um,
but I mean there's literally a scene for those of
(23:52):
you who don't know or don't remember, there's literally a
scene when Pocahonas encounters John Smith for the first time.
They haven't spoken. He's a stranger. She can't speak English
and he can't speak her language, and she is surrounded
by this magical, glittery rainbow wind and suddenly she can
speak English and perfectly. And it's it's weird, and a
(24:15):
lot of people makes sense take issue with it. But Caroline,
I mean the thing I don't think you're getting because Caroline,
have you ever heard the wolf cry to a bluecorn moon? What? Well,
deeper question? What is a bluecorn moon? I don't know.
I might be getting the lyrics wrong. Horn Moon William horne.
(24:35):
Who's to say, yeah, it could be a blue corn
blue horn. Um or Or asked the grinning Bobcat why
he grins, Well, I just talked to my raccoon friend
that follows me around everywhere. I mean, I will say
that when this movie came out, the feature film my
mother was, she was not about to let me see
(24:57):
it because, in her words, is revisionist history. He's revision's history.
But more I think she took issue with the fact
that Pocons was not talking to a tree. She could
not talk to trees. So so that was my that
was my Pokehonta's history. But we do want to uh
correct that revisionist history. Let's revise that revisionist history. When
(25:19):
we come right back from a quick break and talk
about who Pokehonas really was. And now back to the show.
So before we took a break, we were talking about, well,
my mother's this taste for revision's history and Disney animated
feature films. But more importantly, um, we need to talk
(25:42):
about though, the very real truth of how this legend
of Pocahonas which snowballed into this Disney film and the
follow up film. There was a follow up of Pocahona
st where they were like sorry about that, but was
even worse they didn't really correct anything. Um, But we
(26:04):
need to talk about how this so called Pocahontas paradox,
as academics call it today, has served, you know, really
too mold a more European understanding of Native American women.
We really see Native American women a lot of times
through this Pocahontas lens. And you know, we should explain
(26:26):
that the Pocahontas paradox what it is, because we've mentioned
it several times since it is in the name of
several studies we've cited. But it's the same thing as
the Princess squad dilemma or the Prince's prostitute syndrome, or
as you might know it, the Madonna Wore paradox as well.
But it's basically combining the stereotypes of the beautiful, exotic,
(26:47):
lustful woman and the dangerous, strong, powerful woman. It's basically
a lot of fears about women. Yeah, and not to
turn this into an episode of stuff you missed in
history class, but we need to do our due diligence
of just ironing out what really happened. Um. First of all,
Pocahonas was from the Moto Pony tribe. And by the way,
(27:11):
Pocahonas was not actually her name. It was a Powertan
nickname meaning the naughty one or spoiled child. And her
personal name was mata Waca or Matoa, and she also
had a public name of Amnute, and she was the
daughter of Chief Powertin. But it's also important to remember
too that Chief Patin was not a king, which means
(27:33):
that po was not a princess. Although with the Moto
Pony tribe the chieftain power was matrilineal. However, Pocahonas would
not have been the next in line. It would have
been one of it would have been a brother still
getting the being handed the chief torch, which is also
(27:55):
which is also not how things work. I am now
mangling history yet again. Hot at every turn we're running
into hurdles. But okay, so there is a definite questionable
time frame here, because you know, we mentioned that in
the Disney movie she is a fully developed adult woman
who falls in love with John Smith. But actually in
(28:17):
the time that Pocahonas and her family encountered John Smith
in seven, Pocahonas actually would have been about ten or
eleven years old, and the whole circumstance by which she
first meets him is still something that historians and anthropologists
are trying to figure out. There's still a lot of
(28:38):
theories about how they initially encountered each other. Now, of course,
as the legend goes, which John Smith wrote years after
Pocahonas died, um, he says that she essentially rescued him
from being killed by Chief Powaton. And that's probably not
(29:00):
what happened at all. I mean, there there's a chance
that perhaps there was a ceremonial introduction happening and she
interrupted it. Because there's also a good chance that she
would not have had like it would not have been
her role to be in that place at that time. Um. Yeah,
all sorts of things that could have happened. But John
(29:21):
Smith is not the most reliable narrator for this story. Yeah,
because the whole thing is that he wrote this account
of spending a winter with this group of people, um,
and the account didn't mention anything of the sort about
a rescue. It wasn't until seventeen years later that he
wrote the follow up account, and historians basically say, like, yeah,
(29:44):
there was a pre existing story about a Native American
young woman who did help out a white guy at
some point, So he could have stolen the story because
it sounded good, or he could have actually been helped
out by old Pocahonas, But either way, it's possible that
he was just trying to make his way as a
(30:05):
writer of New World adventures after it was pretty clear
that because he was such a jerk, he wouldn't actually
be going back there to make his fortune. Well, and
it would have furnished his image because by this time
Pocahonas was well known because she had, you know, been
to Europe and made this huge impression. So how convenient
for him to be like, oh, bt Dubbs, she actually, uh,
(30:26):
she rescued me. So yeah. But in sixteen twelve, then
seventeen year old Pocohonas, who was married at the time.
She was married to a Palatin named Kakum, who in
the Disney movie is portrayed as a violent, savage creature
who she chooses John Smith over by the way um
(30:49):
she's married, she's taken prisoner by Jamestown residents on a
ship for more than a year, and while she was captive,
she meets John Rawle, who is twenty eight already a
widower because it is sixteen twelve, and he takes an
interest in her. Some sorts to say that, yeah, the
feelings were mutual. Um. But in the process she converts
(31:13):
to Christianity. She's baptized under the name Rebecca and Mary's Rolf.
And this is a huge deal for the Europeans because
this means that the now renamed Rebecca Rolf is the
first American Indian woman on record to marry a white
guy and even more importantly, convert to Christianity. What a
(31:37):
prime example of how these Europeans are bringing civilization to
the quote unquote New World. And she made such a
splash in sixteen sixteen when she and her husband traveled
to England because she captured their imaginations. She was the
New World equivalent of a princess. Here's this woman who
(31:58):
has been made rafa end and civilized by the civilizing
influence of her white husband. But she's also the daughter
of the Indian equivalent of a king right well, which
also justified Ralph marrying her because a lot of people
still were horrified at the thought of that kind of
(32:19):
racial intermingling. Too, so that the Indian princes stereotype also
served that role. Yeah, but so in England she was
used in the Virginia Company of London's campaigns to get
people to move to the New World. And of course
she eased people's fears because oh, well, she's in a
ball gown or a big, you know, fancy dress, just
(32:40):
like I am. So clearly she's not that savage. But
the story does not have a happy ending, as one
might imagine. In sixteen seventeen, she got very ill on
the way back to America, and when they basically turned
around and came back to England to get her help,
she ended up dying at the age of twenty one.
(33:01):
And well, she probably died of something that I'm sure
a lot of people died of at the time, possibly pneumonia, tuberculosis,
or some type of smallpox. Contemporary reports of the day,
tying in with this whole legend and the whole stereotyping,
said that she died of a broken heart. Oh goodness,
it was probably likelier smallpox or just living in uh,
(33:22):
sixteen seventeen, because remember too, by the time Ralph meets
hero at twenty eight, he's already a widower. Um. But
it's just incredible that that rather tragic, not tragic to
the point of say Sarky Bartman, who we talked about
in our episode on fat Bottomed Girls, um, but still someone,
(33:44):
you know, this woman of color being shipped off to
Europe specifically to be used kind of put on display
in a way. And if you look at drawings and
depictions of her um from Save the seventeen d eighteen hundreds,
it is very disnified already because it's her with very
(34:05):
long lashes, she has um, you know, very she's very attractive.
She's wearing a ballgown, but also she's wearing a headdress.
So it's like the melding of these two, these two cultures. Yeah.
And so of course, now that we have told you
the true story with a sad ending, let's look back
at Disney and what the cartoon version did in terms
(34:28):
of furthering stereotypes, because we already mentioned Pocahon's near magical
powers thanks to her of course, because she's an Indian,
her super amazing connection with nature, and of course the
furthering of the stereotype totally serves to disconnect her from
the actual human person that we've just told you she was, well,
(34:50):
and there's the whole thing too with falling in love
with the first white man. She sees that's a common
um trope within a trope, and Perety, who we cited earlier,
said that quote. Disney has created a marketable new age
pocahonist to embody our millennial dreams for wholeness and harmony
while banishing our nightmares of savagery and emptiness. In this regard,
(35:14):
how Indian women are portrayed in the movies is an
extension of White America's attempt to cope with a sense
of cultural guilt. And that also reminds me of that
paper by Nancy myth Flow, Our Indian Princess, in which
she interviews a lot of Native American artists, and one
of whom was talking about how um everyone She's like,
(35:34):
everyone always wants me to paint the warrior chief on
a horse, and of course I never am going to
I'm never going to do that because it's you know,
fulfilling this image. Although there are some days when I
am hungry and I need money, and I consider, you know,
how how quickly could I paint that horse? How quickly
(35:55):
could I do that? Because it is all of this.
It ties into all of this imagery God, and it
goes back to that Arthur Miller guy who was just
painting images of the savage Native people's, you know, all
of them running around without clothes on and being sinful. Well,
and even farther back to because Sydney, say fifteventy five
(36:16):
when we first see those, uh, those paintings of the
Indian Queen. And there's a lot of conversation about art
in this because it is important because kind of like
from our Women Explorers episode where you have the botanist
sitting there painting these flowers because obviously Google image did
not exist, photography what did not exist, and so you
(36:37):
relied on art to see these these new worlds. Yeah,
and I mean this ties together so many things we've
talked about because just like in our Spicy Latina episode
where we talked about what modern media is doing four
stereotypes of Latino women, it's the same thing. It's just
not it's not primetime TV obviously, but it's paintings and
(36:59):
lithographs and rawings and journal accounts that are going back
to England to inform people's image and their thought process
about what the new world was like and so for
a lot of people, that meant that it was a wild,
scary place full of savage, sinful people who walked around
(37:19):
without shirts on. Yeah. And and the unfortunate thing is
I have noticed that a lot of people, especially like
a lot of Americans today who are not native American,
we're not American Indians, often tend to greet these kinds
of conversations with an eye roll of like, oh, well,
(37:40):
here we go again about the American Indians. Yeah, we know,
we know, and or whenever, for instance, there are conversations about, hey,
that that stereotypical kind of racist mascot. We might not
want to use that anymore. People, You know what, It's
just a mascot, Come on, um, but it's actually no
(38:02):
just being wilfully ignorant of history and why it's just
strange that we are so a lot a lot of
people are so um intensely defensive of wearing blinders to it,
right exactly. And so that leads us to our next
point about how these stereotypes affect our kids. Because we
mentioned at the top of the podcast that there are
very real issues, social issues, economic issues affecting a lot
(38:26):
of American Indians today, and a lot of times that
starts with children because, uh pe, we already argues that
this whole stereotyping issue is part of a larger miseducation
of all of our children, both Native and otherwise, because
you have non Native children who developed these stereotypes of
the continents, aboriginal inhabitants um and Native American children being
(38:51):
presented with confusing reflections and interpretations of their own cultures.
Because you know how many people are going to go
out and serve which of the truth in terms of like,
especially with non Native people. I mean, you're gonna be
presented with a stereotype or a story about Christopher Columbus
and you're going to be like, well, I don't know
how else to get a different version of things. So cool. Yeah,
(39:15):
And we read a study from two thousand eight in
the Basic and Applied Social Psychology Journal looking at the
psychological impacts of American Indian sports mascots on Native American kids,
and what was interesting about the finding was that the
students themselves reported positive associations with these actual mascots, but
(39:36):
at the same time reported depressed state self esteem and
community worth. Because even though we might see these mascots.
I mean, Caroline, let's go ahead and identify the elephant
in the room, which is the fact that we live
in Atlanta and our baseball team, our beloved hometown team,
are the Atlanta Braves, and we have a mascot called
(39:58):
Chief Nakahoma. That's not okay? And do I do the
tomahawk chops sometimes? Yeah, And that's probably not okay. Um,
because these might seem like just fun kinds of fandom things,
but they clearly in the process of collapsing these cultures
and limiting the of what kids kind of can see
(40:21):
themselves in leads to that, you know, the lowered self esteem. Yeah.
And so the writers of that study said that basically
American Indian mascots are harmful because they remind American Indians
of the limited ways that others see them and in
this way constrain how they can see themselves. And it's
(40:41):
in it's things like this that are especially in sidious,
especially when you look at girls in particular. Teresa la
FROMBOS did some research into Native American adolescents and found
that girls were six times more likely to be sexually
abused than boys. They're more prone to depression and more
(41:02):
likely to be suicidal with higher incidents of alcohol abuse,
and she writes the impact of the welfare culture and
the losses can be identified at the individual level by
feelings of victimization attributable to racism and stereotyping, value conflicts
or confusion, isolation, and oppression. She writes, unresolved grief over
(41:23):
losses and effects of ongoing cultural genocide are often presented
by clients in the form of chronic cycles of crisis
and oppression. So what do we do? I mean, that's heavy?
What do we How do we? Is it possible to
even fix that? And fix seems like too simple of
a word. Yeah, well, I mean, so we've presented here
that the a lot of the issue is how children
(41:44):
see themselves and the image that they see reflected back
when they turn on the on the television, and so
pee wee reready that educator activist author calls on his
fellow teachers, for instance, to encourage reflective exploration of this
and other dimensions of multicultural education. Basically, get in on
the ground level, show kids that there are so many
(42:07):
multifaceted cultures out there, that it's not just pocahonas and
the majestic Indian chief well. And this also brings up
a quote from Wilma Mankiller, who we did a podcast
on a long time ago. Um, she was the first
woman to lead the Chaerokee nation, and she said quote
the appalling lack of accurate information about Indigenous women fuels
(42:31):
negative stereotypes. Television, film, and print media often portray Indigenous
women as a sexual drudges, the squaw, or innocent children
of nature. The power, strength, and complexity of Indigenous women
are rarely acknowledged or even recognized, probably because of these
very stereotypes we've been talking about, and I mean so
(42:51):
tying all of the harm that these stereotypes can do
back to education, I mean, Pewee Aready basically addresses the
fact that there's so much to learn and to unlearn.
And my thought about it in reading all of these
sources was that it's good to remember that history tends
(43:12):
to be the stories of the winner, the conqueror the
person who won the war. And so even though we
have things like matrilineal cultures in Native American societies and
women holding important roles in positions, the European men who
came over wouldn't have even noticed or cared, or they
(43:32):
wouldn't have wanted it reflected and sent back to their
families in England. And so a lot of the histories
that we hear focus only on men, and not only
on just men, but on the noble savage. And so
the more we can learn about both women in all
of these various cultures, and the more that we can
focus on the fact that these were real, actual three
(43:55):
dimensional humans, I think the better will be. Yeah, And
this is probably with the point where we need to
do a follow up episode at some point to actually
talk about those women, you know, to highlight Native American
women both from history and today who have helped shape
(44:15):
these tribes and these cultures and who are still working
every day to advocate on behalf of them and on
behalf of you know, people outside of their tribes as well.
But this is where we have to wrap up today.
So really curious to hear from listeners about this. If
(44:35):
there are any American Indians listening, anyone who has any
insights direct insights into this Indian princess stereotype, we'd love
to hear from you. Mom Stuff at how stuff works
dot Com is our email address you can also tweet
us at moms a podcast, or messages on Facebook. And
we've got a couple of messages to share with you
right now. Okay, I have a letter here from Judith
(45:02):
about our Girl Gangs episode. She says, I really enjoyed it,
but I had a few thoughts after listening. I really
thought that this topic could have been expanded. I know
you guys have constraints sometimes. This is probably a whole
other topic. There are women like Griselle de Blanco, who
was a famous drug lord of the Median cartel and
one of the first in the cocaine trade of Miami
during the seventies. She was also known as the Black
(45:24):
Widow she killed her ex husband's, the cocaine godmother, and
the queen of narco trafficking. If you look at places
like Baltimore and d C. There's been an uptick in
recent years in girl gangs, even as recently as this
past week when headlines were made in Baltimore. Also, many
gangs that are formed by women are not necessarily for
offensive means, but for defense, like in the Pink Sorry
(45:47):
gang in India, which was created to protect women from
domestic violence and abuse of all sorts. Or the gang
of women in Mexico that are protecting others from violent cartels,
and while not necessarily an organized gang, you also have
Diana the Hunter Nuarez, who again protects victims of rape
and abuse. Like I said, I'm a big fan of
the podcast. I just thought the topic could have been
fleshed out more along the lines of race, especially in class.
(46:10):
Thanks guys, and thank you Judith. Um. You bring up
some really excellent points. Um. You know, we we were
focusing more on like a specific subset of the whole
gang issue, but I love your ideas and suggestions, so
thank you. Well. I've got a letter here from Meredith
with the incredible subject line quote they that die mades
will leap apes in Hell? Or why our culture is
(46:34):
anti spinsters? She writes. I teach British literature at a
community college in Texas, and while preparing for a class,
I wrote a poem by Catherine Phillips, a cool lady
who wrote a married state. Her last line sent me
on a j store spiral to understand what was going on.
I came across an old article about the quote and
the subject line of this email and what exactly it meant.
(46:57):
It really shed some interesting light on our cultural aversion
to spinsterhood or virginity in general. The article argues that
it's all because of the English Reformation and the need
for the Protestants and Henry the Eighth, as well as
his children Edward and Elizabeth, to distance the English population
from quote the Popish practice of celibacy by basically denouncing
(47:17):
all celibates as heading directly for Hell, and that quote
he who vows chastity is an infidel. At first, it
seems to be about both men and women who vow chastity,
but as so many unpleasant religious and cultural things do,
it eventually shifts to the idea that maids are the
one who will be doomed to leap apes around Hell.
As religious celibacy ends in fifteen thirty six, the need
(47:40):
to tar priests with this brush ends, and since male
virginity is so often seen as a joke and also improbable,
but female virginity is a threat to the order of things,
it begins to be associated with the social and economic
burden of old maids. Although luckily this saying is now obsolete,
it seems to reflect and strengthen the fears are culture
(48:00):
has had for so long of spinsterhood. I find it
frustrating and also fascinating that this symbol virginity can be
at first upheld as an ideal and then disparage as
something foolish and dangerous. Just another example of an impossible
dichotomy for women do live up to. So thank you
Meredith for that fascinating insight from and she even included
(48:23):
her journal citation from the Journal of American Folklore. And
if you have any journal citations to send our way
or just wanna let us know your thoughts, Mom, stop
at House of Works dot com is our email address
and for links to all of our social media as
well as all of our blogs, videos and podcasts, including
this one with our sources so you can learn more,
(48:44):
perhaps about the true history of Pocahona's. Head on over
to stuff Mom Never Told You dot com for moralness
and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff Works
dot com
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