2) Rand McNally’s Pocahontas: A Little Indian Girl of Jamestown (1957) + Kathleen Krull’s

Pocahontas: Princess of the New World + Pocahontas (1995)

Pocahontas is like a radical story about female agency and empathy disguised as a rather sappy
romance. The actual story of Pocahontas was grim and brutal and turning a story like that into
something fluffy and “empowering” is just uncomfortable. Therefore, Pocahontas is based on a myth.
Growing up, I never imagined Pocahontas being rooted in painful history and how false and distorted
her reality was. Western perspective pervades the story, whereas the cultural aspects get lost along
the way. They should have highlighted more of the ongoing injustice and abuse of land. Pocahontas
is also depicted as a heroine, when she is showing Smith the absurdity of relentlessly taking things
from Earth and by embracing environment. Maybe considering the contrast of the original
Pocahontas and the filmed version, we see that she was actually kidnapped by settlers and forced
into marriage, while the Disney version portrays more romanticism and equality between races. This
was not the case at that time at all, which is why Pocahontas could be a fictive heroine, sort of
reconciling this gruesome past of the Indigenous and Americans and now delivering a curative story
in order to cover the powerlessness of women in the past.