Pocahontas Stereotypes

Popular culture continues to portray Native woman as Indian princess who is willing to give up her cultural heritage and marry into the civilized white culture. Michael King, in "When Fiction Wins: John Davis and the Emergence of a Romantic Pocahontas," confirms that Disney introduces "a stubborn, beautiful, and very adult-looking Pocahontas to millions of children worldwide"(par.28). Between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries, as the colonies moved toward independence, Rayana Green in "The Pocahontas Perplex" writes that "the dominant stereotype of the Native American woman was transformed from a full-bodied, powerful, nurturing but dangerous mother-goddess into a younger, leaner, princess-like figure" (210). The Disney

Pocahontas became a typage for the Indian Princess stereotype in the minds of all viewers. There is an apparent natural tint of her skin. Moreover, Pocahontas figure and dress caused a fierce argument causing disgrace. A. Ward in Mouse Morality: Rhetoric of Disney Animated Film (2002) writes that "Pocahontas’s body has, indeed, generated more opprobrium from commentators than almost any other aspect of the film"(36). The Costume used constructs this stereotype as she wears her one-shoulder dress. Glen Keane, who supervised the animation, comments that he was instructed to make her "the finest creature the human race has to offer" (qtd. in Mouse Morality 36). Similar to the Barbie line doll, Pocahontas stereotype has held a special importance among audiences and has invited children to imagine themselves in the Pocahontas' image to transport themselves into a realm of beauty, glamour, fun, and consumption even marked by an outstanding violation of good taste. Pocahontas has become the most circulated image of ideal feminine beauty for children which leads Native Peoples to receive the wrong impression of themselves and their culture, and how society views