Pocahontas Rhetorical Analysis

Pocahontas Consider the ethnicity that you identify as; how would you react if your culture or ancestors were not depicted correctly in the media? Sadly, all ethnicities have stereotypes that often shape the way that people view that certain race. Focusing on one ethnicity, Native Americans are viewed many different ways, depending on the person. Often times, the media is most responsible for creating movies or books that misinform the public about Native American values, culture, or history because of common stereotypes and the lack of knowledge about the history of Natives.
In the essay, Disney’s “Politically Correct” Pocahontas written by Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, a considerable and well-known example of the media misleading the public, the Disney movie, Pocahontas is discussed.

I connected personally to this text because I am Native American myself, part of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. Although I am Native, my ethnicity does not influence my opinion about the essay completely. I believe that every ethnicity should be depicted truthfully, without deceitfully telling the history or dramatizing it. The exaggeration of Pocahontas was conferred in Kilpatrick’s text. “According to James Pentecost, the film’s producer, the changes that were made were due to the fact that Pocahontas’s real story was simply too long. He said, ‘We decided to dramatize what we felt was the essence of Pocahontas.’ Now the logic may be a little tough to follow here, but evidently what that means is that they changed her age, her body, and gave her a motive for her actions that boils down to going gaga over the first white man she sees” (642-643). The true story of Pocahontas states that Pocahontas was about twelve to ten-years-old when she met John Smith, but in the movie, they instead gave her a voluptuous body of a twenty-year-old woman. Also, there was no romance between Pocahontas and John Smith in the true