Pocahontas
The glorification of the founding fathers and how the interpretation of Pocahontas was unrealistic. The founding fathers have mentioned in the past that “All men are equal” but how was that applicable to the Native Americans during that time? The whole production of Disney's Pocahontas was entirely inaccurate as to what happened in real life for the reason of being shown to younger viewers. In this project, we go into further detail as to why Disney animators chose to do what they did with the movie as well as the hypocrisy that was associated with the founding father's words. For this project, my partner, Inaya Refat and I learned about the many historical inaccuracies of Pocahontas and the injustices the Native American population faced.
Civics
For the history portion of the project, we investigated the promises and rights given to American citizens by the founding fathers that were broken or not upheld. For example, the right to be a slaveholder; nearly 75% of the fathers were known to be slaveholders and completely disregarded the newly granted government slavery authority. The reasoning is shown within this project by the research and breakdown of the hypocrisy of the promises not followed through by the founding fathers in their personal lives. Our product is a rewritten version of the Bill of Rights to make it more accurate as to what actually happened with the empty words spoken by the fathers. There are many declarations made by the FFs, which are not all applicable to the large groups in the population: the Native Americans being one of them. We explored many historical events that have proven the invalidity of the amendments when the citizens were not as privileged as the government officials governing their rights. By rewriting a few of the Amendments, context and reasoning was explored through historical events and the perspective of the Native Americans, Founding Fathers, and government officials was explained.
English
In English, we explored the glorification of Disney's animated version of Pocahontas and how it is astonishingly inaccurate. There are reasons why Disney made this choice, such as being created for younger viewers, so they shouldn't be exposed to such racial and political ideas. There is an understanding as to why they wanted to represent her story, but it is not providing as much awareness of the actual story if it is so romanticized. In this area, reasoning was incorporated with the question “why Disney chose to eliminate realism in the Native American culture?” We made an in-depth synopsis of the first and second movies of Pocahontas with a timestamp of specific inaccuracies that can be backed up with research. With that, there was a brief but informative explanation of all of the falsely written stories. Another product we made was the timeline of the important dates and events taking place throughout Pocahontas’s life. Finally, we fully explored the reasoning behind the drastic changes in the movies by personifying the directors of the movies and making a faux "Q&A" based on the inaccuracies.
Art
For art, analyzed the reason why Native America took reusing so seriously. There are some cases in which their lands were stripped away and they had to rely on a small part of agriculture in order to thrive as a tribe. Our product used the idea of reusing and recycling to create a Native American and English-inspired dress that is from Pocahontas’s actual life story. It was created from cardboard because of the related thought process of reusing and recycling. As a parallel to Native American custom, we used a modern day substitute. Our goal for this product was to relate to the idea of Native Americans being very resourceful given their lack of rights. The process of creating this product was tedious, similar to the actual process of reusing animal parts. To deconstruct two boxes, it took three hours. After this process, I had to dry the material, which was difficult given the poor November weather, but I created a temporary drying room in my sunroom. After the materials were dried, we had to create a final sketch and a plan of action to create the product since neither of us had ever created a fashion piece before. Through trial and error, we created our own patterns and learned how fragile cardboard is when it is stripped. In the end, we assembled the entire product with twine, glue, cardboard, and attached tape when we were photographing the final product. Although one of the most difficult products I've ever made, I found the process to be the most rewarding, and I am extremely proud of the final product.