Disney Loose With Facts About Pocahontas
It could pass for another Disney animated fairy tale: dashing, blond English colonist meets willowy, raven-haired Indian princess and they fall in love.
So what’s wrong with this picture?
Walt Disney Co.’s “Pocahontas,” due in theaters this summer, does not square with historical fact. Unlike the make-believe stars of Disney’s classic cartoon features, Pocahontas and John Smith actually lived.
Pocahontas had not yet reached her teens when Smith - in his early 30s at the time - arrived in the New World. Pocahontas, a chief’s daughter, spared the settler from death at the hands of her angry tribe and taught him about Powhatan Indian culture. He, in turn, schooled her in English.
But the two were never an item.
The animated Pocahontas will not be the innocent 11-year-old who saved Smith’s life. Instead, she will be a slender, tawny-skinned enchantress in a form-fitting buckskin sheath.
“It’s a beautiful story, if it didn’t carry the name of ‘Pocahontas,”’ Shirley Custalow McGowan, an American Indian known to her tribe as Little Dove, said of the contrived romance.
Because of her high cheekbones, Disney artists modeled their Pocahontas character after McGowan. During a visit in August to Disney’s California studios, she discovered that both Pocahontas and Smith will be in their 20s in the movie. When she asked why, Disney officials explained that a romance would make more money, she said.
“They really have it accurate about the heart and soul of our people, but they’re not doing a film about the Powhatan Indians - they’re doing a film about Pocahontas,” she said.
The life of the real Pocahontas was not as glamorous as her cartoon namesake.
She was born in 1595 near Jamestown. According to a 1612 account written by William Strachey, the British first secretary of the Virginia colony, she married a chief from her tribe when she was about 14.
In 1613, when fighting broke out between the Powhatan tribe and white settlers, Pocahontas was lured aboard an English ship and temporarily held captive. During that time, she converted to Christianity and fell in love with Englishman John Rolfe.
In 1614, they married and two years later, Rolfe sailed with her to England. There she met King James I and the British acclaimed her as an American princess. But before she could return to America, she fell ill with smallpox and died at age 21.
Somewhere along the way, the original story line faded.
Disney tried to ensure the film’s accuracy: Its executives met with Virginia Indians and even visited Jamestown. Disney animator and director Mike Gabriel said in 1993 that the movie could be entertaining without departing from historical accuracy.
Disney officials confirmed that the movie Pocahontas will be a young woman and Smith will be twentysomething. But the studio declined requests for interviews. “It’s really too early to start talking about this,” Disney spokesman Howard Green said.
Viewers got a glimpse of “Pocahontas” last fall in a brief clip shown in theaters prior to Disney’s “The Lion King.” In the clip, a lissome Pocahontas sang about the beauty of America to a dashing John Smith who is clearly smitten with her.