In Defense of Pocahontas: Disney's Most Radical Heroine 

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20 years after the movie’s release, its character and premise still feel notably progressive.

In 1938, Walt Disney released the first-ever feature-length animated movie, a project that had been labeled “Disney’s folly” thanks to the industry’s belief that its outsized ambitions would prove catastrophic. Instead,

became the most successful film of the year, grossing $8 million and launching a new cultural phenomenon into the world: the Disney princess.

may have blazed a trail for animation, but it took a while for Disney to acknowledge the potential for anchoring ambitious projects around female characters. It was 12 years before the studio would base another full-length picture on a heroine with the release of

(1991) came more than half a century after Snow White scored Disney seven miniature honorary Oscars at the 1939 Academy Awards, but it was only the sixth Disney film out of 32 to focus primarily on the story of a female character. However it was also a colossal hit, grossing $425 million on a $25 million budget, and the movie’s success inspired the studio to look for another ambitious romance with a bold and compelling heroine. The result was Pocahontas, a dramatic retelling of one of the earliest American stories about a Native American woman and her encounter with an English sailor named John Smith.

When Pocahontas was released on June 23, 1995, the criticism it received for taking historical liberties with Pocahontas’s age and relationship with Smith largely overshadowed the fact that Disney had, for the first time, based an entire picture around an adult female, let alone a woman of color. It was also the first time the studio had produced a film about a real person. The movie might have fudged some facts to allow for a compelling romantic story, but it had a progressive attitude when it came to interpreting history, depicting the English settlers as plunderers searching for non-existent gold who were intent upon murdering the “savages” they encountered in the process.

The film also seemed to embrace an environmentalist message, with Pocahontas showing Smith the absurdity of relentlessly taking things from the Earth instead of seeing its potential. It was a radical story about female agency and empathy disguised as a rather sappy romance, and amid the controversy that arose at the time thanks to the subject matter, many of the film’s best qualities have been forgotten. But 20 years later, its impact can be seen in the new wave of animated Disney films like

itself remains a graceful and well-intentioned entry in the Disney canon.

s release in 1989, the ‘70s and ‘80s were lean times for Disney. The two decades before had seen some of the studio’s most iconic pictures, but films like

was a box-office bomb. From 1961 through 1988, Walt Disney Studios largely focused on stories about talking animals, from

(1973), which reinvented the archetypal English characters as anthropomorphized foxes and bears. In 1984, Roy E. Disney, Walt’s nephew, launched a campaign called “SaveDisney” in which he argued that the studio was losing its magic. After the catastrophic release of

, Roy Disney was put in charge of Disney’s animation department in 1985, and he helped spearhead the company’s creative and financial renaissance of the 1990s.

, the 1989 story of a princess named Ariel who falls in love with a human and decides to trade her voice for the ability to live on land, was a film very much in the old Disney mold—a romantic fairytale with child-friendly humor and compelling supporting characters. 1991’s

was an animal story given a more epic scope, with the Africa savanna framed as a kingdom and the cub Simba depicted as a young Prince Hamlet whose father had been murdered by his uncle.

spurred studio chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg to push for another romance, and directors Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg wanted to pursue a story that had its origins in early American history, while also incorporating the

-esque elements of two people from very different backgrounds falling in love. But unlike the naive and uncertain Ariel and Belle, Pocahontas would be far more confident—“a woman instead of a teenager,” as supervising animator Glen Keane put it. As the producer Jim Pentacost says in Disney’s 1995 documentary about the making of the feature, “Pocahontas is the strongest heroine we’ve ever had in a Disney film.”

“Pocahontas is the strongest heroine we’ve ever had in a Disney film.”

—as expressed by several Native American groups, including the Powhatan Nation, which traces its origins back to Pocahontas herself—is that over time, she’s come to embody the trope of the “Good Indian,” or one who offers her own life to help save a white settler. “Her offer of sacrifice, her curvaceous figure, and her virginal stature have come to symbolize America’s Indian heroine,” wrote Angela Aleiss in an op-ed in

. Aleiss goes on to criticize how female Indian characters are defined by their male relationships, are “tossed aside by the white man” for a woman of his own race, and have nothing in their appeal beyond their “on-screen pulchritude.”

But Pocahontas as a character is much more complex than Aleiss allows. She does throw herself on John Smith as he’s about to be executed, emphasizing the value of human life and the destructive nature of war, but her move is reciprocated minutes later, when Smith then positions himself between Pocahontas’s father and the furious head of the English settlers, Governor Ratcliffe, and gets shot in the process. The injured Smith decides to return home, and begs Pocahontas to go with him, but she chooses to stay with her tribe in her homeland. Instead of sacrificing something for love (like Ariel giving up her voice, or Belle her freedom), Pocahontas puts her identity and heritage first. It’s a bold ending, and one that deliberately subverts real history, which saw the real Pocahontas marry a different Englishman, John Rolfe, and travel to London with him, where she was feted as an example of the “civilized savage” before dying at the age of 21 shortly before her husband was due to sail back to Virginia.

Powhatan Nation has a page on its website in which it also criticizes Disney for propagating the “Good Indian/Bad Indian” theme and basing a movie on what is largely believed to be a lie told by John Smith to enhance his own mystique. “Euro-Americans must ask themselves why it has been so important to elevate Smith’s fibbing to status as a national myth worthy of being recycled again by Disney,” the page says. “Disney even improves upon it by changing Pocahontas from a little girl into a young woman.” But an animated feature about the relationship between a 10-year-old (as Pocahontas is believed to have been at the time she met John Smith) and an adult male would presumably have horrified audiences. “We had the choice of being historically accurate or socially responsible,” Glen Keane said.

“This is also the first time ... that a human face has been put on an Indian female.”

The animator Tom Sito has written about the efforts the creative team went to to try and accurately portray Native American culture, saying, “Contrary to the popular verdict that we ignored history on the film, we tried hard to be historically correct and to accurately portray the culture of the Virginia Algonquins. We consulted with the Smithsonian Institution, a number of Native American experts, Pocahontas’s descendants, the surviving Virginia tribes, and even took several trips to Jamestown itself.” The lyricist, Stephen Schwartz (best-known for his Broadway smash,

) also traveled to Jamestown to research Native American music and history while working on the movie’s songs.

When asked about whether he thought the movie accurately portrayed history, the Native American actor Russell Means, who gave his voice to Pocahontas’s father, said he was shocked by how revolutionary the plot was: “The Eurocentric males are admitting why they came here—to kill Indians and to rob and pillage. That’s never been done before. This is also the first time, other than on

, that a human face has been put on an Indian female.”

While its interpretation of history attracted considerable criticism, less was written about the fact that Disney had, for the first time, provided an independent and fearless heroine with a strong sense of self. Pocahontas, whose marriage has been arranged by her father to a warrior named Kocoum, expresses doubt that he’ll be a good match for her, stating that he’s “so … serious.” She seeks guidance from her elders, but also knows herself well enough to intuit that she’s too unconventional for such a husband. Compared to Belle, who’s imprisoned by the Beast before eventually seeing his good side, or Ariel, who falls in love with Prince Eric at first sight, or Cinderella and Aurora and Snow White, all of whom seem to accept that their marriages are pre-ordained, Pocahontas has a remarkable amount of acuity when it comes to choosing a romantic partner—to the point where she’s able to let him go rather than sacrifice her happiness.

Disney had, for the first time, provided an independent and fearless heroine with a strong sense of self.

Her strength and bravery are traits that Disney also gave to the character of Mulan, who disguises herself as a man so that she can go to war in place of her elderly father. But after the release of that movie in 1998, Disney wouldn’t produce a movie about a female hero until 2009’s

, the success of which spurred a new series of stories about gutsy heroines: 2010’s

, which took over a billion dollars at the box office and became the highest-grossing animated film of all time.

It’s maybe overstating things to say that there would be no Elsa or Rapunzel or Merida without Pocahontas, but to overlook her status as the first truly empowered Disney heroine is to miss a real turning point for female characters in the 20th century. In an essay for

, Kaitlin Ebersol aligns the phases of Disney heroines with the various waves of feminism in the 20th century and beyond. “By the 1990s, a third wave of feminism, which dealt specifically with feminine sexuality, had arisen in response to failures of the second wave,” she writes. “The third wave began destabilizing former contracts of body, gender, and sexuality, and encouraged every woman to define femininity, beauty, and orientation for herself ... These newer princesses reflected society’s drastically altered beliefs about who women are and how they should act.”

Not only was Pocahontas a radical reimagining of the Disney heroine, the movie she starred in was itself attempting to both re-explore history and to encourage empathy as a guiding quality for young viewers. If

when it comes to thinking about the treatment of animals, Means has said, “

teaches that pigmentation and bone structure have no place in human relations. It’s the finest feature film on American Indians Hollywood has turned out.”

NBC might have canceled the critically acclaimed show, but the new nature of television means it’s likely to live on online.

The meaning of the Confederate flag is best discerned in the words of those who bore it.

This afternoon, in announcing her support for removing the Confederate flag from the capitol grounds, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley asserted that killer Dylann Roof had “a sick and twisted view of the flag” which did not reflect “the people in our state who respect and in many ways revere it.” If the governor meant that very few of the flag’s supporters believe in mass murder, she is surely right. But on the question of whose view of the Confederate Flag is more twisted, she is almost certainly wrong.

Roof’s belief that black life had no purpose beyond subjugation is “sick and twisted” in the exact same manner as the beliefs of those who created the Confederate flag were “sick and twisted.” The Confederate flag is directly tied to the Confederate cause, and the Confederate cause was white supremacy. This claim is not the result of revisionism. It does not require reading between the lines. It is the plain meaning of the words of those who bore the Confederate flag across history. These words must never be forgotten. Over the next few months the word “heritage” will be repeatedly invoked. It would be derelict to not examine the exact contents of that heritage.

For centuries, experts have predicted that machines would make workers obsolete. That moment may finally be arriving. Could that be a good thing?

The end of work is still just a futuristic concept for most of the United States, but it is something like a moment in history for Youngstown, Ohio, one its residents can cite with precision: September 19, 1977.

For much of the 20th century, Youngstown’s steel mills delivered such great prosperity that the city was a model of the American dream, boasting a median income and a homeownership rate that were among the nation’s highest. But as manufacturing shifted abroad after World War  II, Youngstown steel suffered, and on that gray September afternoon in 1977, Youngstown Sheet and Tube announced the shuttering of its Campbell Works mill. Within five years, the city lost 50,000 jobs and $1.3 billion in manufacturing wages. The effect was so severe that a term was coined to describe the fallout:

Section 8 was intended to help people escape poverty, but instead it’s trapping them in it.

When a woman in McKinney, Texas, told Tatiana Rhodes and her friends to “go back to your Section 8 homes” at a public pool earlier this month, she inadvertently spoke volumes about the failure of a program that was designed to help America’s poor.

Created by Congress in 1974, the “Section 8” Housing Choice Voucher Program was supposed to help families move out of broken urban neighborhoods to places where they could live without the constant threat of violence and their kids could attend good schools.

But somewhere along the way, “Section 8” became a colloquialism for housing that is, to many, indistinguishable from the public-housing properties the program was designed to help families escape.

From secession to the 'Southern strategy,' the fight over South Carolina’s identity has played out in the flags it flies.

The controversy over the flying of the Confederate flag at the South Carolina state capitol begins with secession. That history winds from the first raising of the Confederate flag to the Charleston massacre. While defenders of the Confederate flag exalt it as an emblem of regional “heritage,” it was designed as the ensign of a slaveholders’ republic, revived a century later as the symbol of massive resistance to civil rights and became an iconic code for the Republicans’ Southern strategy.

“We stood on the balcony to see our Confederate flag go up. Roars of cannon, &c&c,” wrote Mary Chesnut in her diary on March 5, 1861. It was the day after Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration in Washington. Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, chivalrously gave the honor of raising the flag for the first time to a figure of exalted Southern womanhood, Letitia Christian Tyler. She was the granddaughter of former President John Tyler of Virginia, himself a supporter of the Confederate cause. “My heart beat with wild joy and excitement,” Tyler later recalled in

Confederate Veteran. The band played “Massa Is Buried in the Cold, Cold Ground.”

The racist manifesto attributed to alleged Charleston shooter Dylann Roof made a surprising concession to multiculturalism. “As an American we are taught to accept living in the melting pot, and black and other minorities have just as much right to be here as we do, since we are all immigrants,” it said. But the author wrote that learning what was happening in Europe—“the homeland of White people”—was a key step in his racial awakening. “I saw that the same things were happening in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries. … [I]n many ways the situation is even worse there.”

He never makes clear what “the situation” is, but the language echoes a worry shared by white supremacists in the United States and overseas. As Morris Dees and J. Richard Cohen of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks hate groups, wrote in

on Monday, the author’s apparent concern with the loss of white dominance in America and Europe is a sign of “the growing globalization of white nationalism.” They continued:

Some researchers believe that the microbiome may play a role in regulating how people think and feel.

By now, the idea that gut bacteria affects a person’s health is not revolutionary. Many people know that these microbes influence digestion, allergies, and metabolism. The trend has become almost commonplace: New books appear regularly detailing precisely which diet will lead to optimum bacterial health.

But these microbes’ reach may extend much further, into the human brains. A growing group of researchers around the world are investigating how the microbiome, as this bacterial ecosystem is known, regulates how people think and feel. Scientists have found evidence that this assemblage—about a thousand different species of bacteria, trillions of cells that together weigh between one and three pounds—could play a crucial role in autism, anxiety, depression, and other disorders.

The Long Odds Against New York\'s Fugitive Prisoners

Prison breaks are surprisingly common, but most maximum-security escapees are caught quickly.

For days after Richard Matt and David Sweat’s June 6 escape from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, there seemed to be little concrete evidence of where they were. Reports had them heading toward Vermont or perhaps Canada. Then they were thought to be near the Pennsylvania border. As hundreds of law enforcement officers combed through roads and fields and forests, Matt and Sweat stayed out of sight.

Monday’s discovery of DNA belonging to both men in a cabin only about 25 miles from the prison—DNA seemingly just a few days old—suggests that police may be getting closer to them. That’s very different from having the two men in hand. But statistics on prison escapees suggest that Sweat and Matt will have a very hard time avoiding recapture—though if they make it past the first month, their odds seem to improve.

No single law could have stopped the tragedy in Charleston, but incremental steps can reduce the risk of future attacks.

Mass shooters, although almost always male, in many other ways grimly echo the diversity of American life. Dylann Roof in Charleston is white. Elliott Rodgers at UC-Santa Barbara was of mixed English-Chinese origins. Major Nidal Malik Hasan of Fort Hood is of Palestinian descent. Aaron Alexis, who killed at the Washington Navy Yard, was black. Their belief systems are distinctive too, sometimes right, sometimes left, sometimes religious, sometimes secular. Some are deeply mentally ill, but many more are not. And so on backward through the list of these

Despite their differences, however, these mass killers shared one quality with each other and with every other American besides: easy access to deadly weapons.

The 2016 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet

Can Bobby Jindal, a one-time rising star, reverse his fortunes and rise again?

Usually, a campaign launch is an opportunity for get-to-know-the-candidate coverage. The obituaries wait until he or she ends a campaign or loses. With Bobby Jindal, it’s just the opposite: Reporters have greeted his entry into the Republican contest with elegies to his political potential.

Maybe that’s not so bad—he’s got nowhere to go but up, and longtime Jindal observers say his political skills shouldn’t be underestimated. Yet it’s amazing how quickly Jindal has gone from rising Republican star to afterthought. Jindal seemed to have it all: He was a Rhodes Scholar, a wonk and a technocrat; he had strong social-conservative credentials and a powerful story of conversion to Christianity; and in a party worried about diversity, he wasn’t just another aging white man.

… even when other people are screwing you over.

Research labs, like most workplaces, come in two broad varieties: The cut-throat kind, where researchers are always throwing elbows in a quest for prestige, and the collaborative kind, where they work together for the good of the team. And when David Rand first established his Human Cooperation Lab at Yale University, he was clear about the kind of culture he wanted to promote.

Rand’s post-docs help each other and share their expertise willingly, he says. Rand spends some of the lab’s money on social events and happy hours. “Not in a lame, cheesy way, but in a way that’s fun for people,” he told me recently. “It creates bonds among people and makes them not want to cut each other down.”

That’s because Rand’s research center is devoted to examining the behavioral economics of niceness, and over the years his studies have pointed to one clear takeaway: Being collegial is good for both individual workers and for businesses as a whole.

Imagine a world where everyone sleeps well, because no one sleeps together.

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