41 Before that, like other girl children (no writer mentioned boys' dress). ‘So white’ New York Times wedding announcement mercilessly mockedįollow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. That is how Pocahontas dressed after she reached puberty in about 1609-10. This red lipstick line was made especially for dark-skinned women Grandmothers react to ripped jeans: ‘Disgusting’ and ‘a proper disgrace’ Bear the elegant tribal dress of the princess with our Native Beauty Pocahontas Costume for women, or give the theme an alluring edge with our Pocahottie. “For natives, it’s not a costume,” Nahdee reiterates. If what they really want is to teach about indigenous cultures, educators could instead have a member of that culture come in and speak to the kids. “The least a non-Native parent can do is explain to their child what’s wrong with this costume and this film, so the child doesn’t grow up to be a racist adult who causes more harm.”īy the way, it’s not a great idea for teachers to have young students make headdresses or war bonnets to learn about Thanksgiving either. “We are the ones who grew up being spoon-fed the idea that Pocahontas on the other end of a white man’s rifle is supposed to be ‘romantic,’ ” she says. They used the legend promoted by white Europeans and aged the girl up to be a sexy woman instead of a young teenager. The movie’s producers did their research, she said, but in their behind-the-scenes featurette, Roy Disney, Jim Pentecost, and supervising animator Glen Keane said they decided to ignore the fact that she was a child when she met the colonists, and she in fact never saved John Smith from being executed.

“Pocahontas was kidnapped, raped, abused, forced to assimilate, forced to convert to Christianity, forced to marry one of her captors, and the Mattaponi sacred oral history is convinced that her untimely death may have been the result of a poisoning rather than an illness,” Nahdee tells Yahoo Lifestyle. Earlier this year, in Indian Country Today, she outlined the many harmful discrepancies between the 1995 Disney film Pocahontas and the woman’s real tragic history. To unpack the argument, Yahoo Lifestyle turned to Ali Nahdee, a white and Anishinaabe/Ojibwa writer who created the Aila Test - a Bechdel test for depictions of indigenous women.

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