I knew very little about Thanksgiving and Pocahontas besides the more ideal description of the two historic events. Pocahontas in particular I knew very little about and having never seen the Disney adaptation I did not know much about the story. Learning about Native American history in this class has been very eye opening because of the contrast between the good and the bad that has happened in history. I feel that when it came to my past experience learning about Indigenous history there was just a classification of bad and good but not an actual explanation of the historic events. In class when we learned of the Pocahontas very short life I was amazed that she has made such an impact in American history due to how short her life was. The way they portrayed her in art also caught my attention and this connects to the complexity of history due to the fact that they changed her appearance to match European standards. Understanding that she was used as a prop to show the success of the English made sense why she has been so prominent in history.
Our readings of the “Letter from Edward Winslow to a Friend” and “President Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation” showed me how Native Americans have been erased over time. The complexity of history is that it has been written by certain authors and many voices have been forgotten or muffled. In the two readings I mentioned above the Indigenous people do not have a voice and instead are described by outside sources or not mentioned at all in Lincoln’s case. I was amazed that in a speech about Thanksgiving he did not mention Indigenous people once and instead the speech felt more focused on the Civil War. The main point I took from this week was the way that colonizers erased Indigenous people from their own land. Either by pushing them off the land, killing them, or trying to change their identity to match a more European stereotype. The instances where Native Americans stood up for their right to the land always ended in some way very tragic and Europeans used many techniques in order to repress them and keep them from impeding on their colonization advances.
Hi Brianna!
We have certainly been grappling with so many myths throughout this class! It was interesting to see everyone’s reactions to the imagery and portrayals of Pocahontas, and that many people actually haven’t seen the Disney film. The movie was very new when I was little, so I think it was more popular with my generation. There have been so many attempts to portray Pocahontas’ likeness and life, giving way to a very romanticized and colonial interpretation of who she was (and what the English wanted her to be). I thought it was interesting how the portraits we studied in class were the only “life portraits” actually completed while she was alive.
Your post also grapples with a very important theme from this week, which is erasure. When dealing with historical sources (or any historical narrative), we must consider who it was produced by and who it was produced for. Additionally, some sources, like Winslow’s letter, can help us see events in a more realistic light. In this case, the first Thanksgiving was neither planned nor extravagant, but it has been romanticized into a grand event. It’s equally useful to compare it with Lincoln’s proclamation, which doesn’t mention Native peoples at all!