"Red man", ugh

[bunsen_h]

Little T is fascinated by the Disney fairies, so I thought it might be fun for her to watch Peter Pan, which started the whole Disney fairy thing with Tinker Bell.  I put my name in the library queue to borrow the DVD.

I finally got to the front of the queue a few days ago.  Due to Circumstances Beyond My Control, little T hasn't been spending much time here, but I figured that I might as well watch the movie myself.  I remember having enjoyed it when I was young, and I'm much in need of light entertainment lately.

Wow. That movie is astonishingly racist about native Americans: "Injuns", "Red men".  It doesn't merely have stereotypes; a major song-and-dance number is all about the stereotypes: why does he ask you "how"?; when did he first say "ugh"?  It's a movie that young people should not see without a discussion of the stereotypes, and of the cultural background that lead to them.  When my grade 9 English class did The Merchant of Venice, the teacher introduced the play by explaining the way that Jewish people fit into Elizabethan society... or didn't fit.  How they were treated, and the laws that restricted them, and so on.

Children as young as little T probably wouldn't sit still long enough to have a discussion like that.  I don't see how to solve this.  A complicating factor is that one of mentisiterinvit's sibs is First Nations... he was adopted, but their parents did as much as they could to teach him about his cultural heritage.  We don't want little T to think that he's anything like the characters in that movie.

Ugh.
 

Comments

[batyatoon]

I'm not sure there is a way to solve it. It makes sense in context because Neverland is all about pretend, and the Neverland Indians -- like the Neverland pirates -- are entirely out of the pretendings of British children of a particular era, which come entirely out of vague and distorted storybooks and word-of-mouth tales. But that's not an easy concept for a kid to grasp, nor an easy one to explain.

[radargrrl.livejournal.com]

Call it a product of its time. Now go watch 'Pocahontas', and for an encore, see if you can't find 'Song of the South'.