In my personal opinion, it’s been fairly easy to comprehend everything that I’ve been informed of and read about this past week. Maybe one particular way that this new knowledge complicates my own questioning is how it was so easy to learn about Thanksgiving and colonialism when we were younger; obviously due to the lack of info we were given in order to further simplify it for our understanding as children.
A great example of this oversimplification is the story of Pocahontas. As kids, our first source and introduction if the Disney adaptation of her story. I’m willing to bet that if you were to ask the next generation to tell us what they know or what they think of when they hear Pocahontas or John Smith, they’ll be more than likely to point at the Disney adaptation. This is obviously VERY bad since Disney has a long history of taking more GRIMM stories (get it? Brothers Grimm) and sprinkling them with cupcake and rainbow magic.
It wasn’t until a few years ago that I found out that Pocahontas was twelve to thirteen years old at the time of these events and that John Smith was likely a pedophile and DEFINETLY a racist. It wasn’t until this year that I learn of how Pocahontas was taken away from her home and forced to fully assimilate into European society, forcibly married off, had a child and died shortly after just for companies to capitalize off of her change out of spite and pettiness towards the Natives. It breaks my heart to know that Pocahontas saved John Smith’s life just for her to get taken away to live and die unhappy in return.
It’s important to take note of this type of complexity because we need to teach younger people of these particular details without the need for college. From the beginning of our learning of United States history, we aren’t meant to learn the true, in not the larger, fallacies of America. Not everyone will go to college, not every college has a Native History course, and not everyone gets to finish high school either.
Hi Vic!
I’m glad to hear that you enjoyed engaging with the readings and topics from this week. I think as you point out, most of us have some foundation with these topics (especially Pocahontas and Thanksgiving), but it has largely been sanitized because we were taught about them at such a young age. Also, I agree that it is so important to deal with these really complex topics, and think about how we tell future generations about these narratives in a way that doesn’t perpetuate the harm of the mythology around them!