Native American Women in Film
Uploaded by maikaqt on Jul 18, 2007
Native American Women in Film
White directors have often steered clear of representing Native American women in film. They prefer to focus on the savage Indian man who battles the brave white man. Simply being a Native American woman, from the perspective of the white spectator, have been seen as contradictions. Motherhood and the care and responsibilities that the role entails humanizes Native Americans and makes their varied histories too complex. Instead, the focus is on young, often prepubescent, Indian maidens. In any event, telling the story of Native American women from the white male perspective is problematic. Native Americans have, throughout the history of film, been tragically depicted within a white male frame. To add to this frame the dimension of gender often means forcing Native American women into roles as white male fetish. The Native American woman is presented as the antithesis of what is white and male. She is forced to become the embodiment or not only what white Americans do not see, or wish to see, in themselves, but also a fetish of “otherness” that, having rejected, white Americans now long for. It is no wonder that the narrative and physical appearance of Pocahontas is sexually charged. Pocahontas is the embodiment of the repressed desires of white men. (Georgakas, 301; Good Housekeeping, 411)
It is without question that Disney’s depiction of Pocahontas is a flagrant misrepresentation of both the woman and her life story. However, even if the spectator expects and accepts that much of the account will be fictitious, the image of Pocahontas is so imbued in stereotypes that it would take a truly educated spectator to leave the film without having regressed in his thinking of Native American women. Whereas a white spectator could easily understand that, say, Ariel from The Little Mermaid is an anomaly, the same can not be so easily deciphered from Pocahontas. Pocahontas does something truly frightening by presenting a truly authentic “otherness.” Unfortunately, this otherness is just that, otherness and in no way representative of any Native American culture. Pocahontas is in every way a white male fantasy. She is perfectly beautiful in the western sense of the term: she has long legs, long hair, and an hourglass figure. She is scantily clad in western clothing with an “Indian look”, and she...