Disney’s 1996 movie “Pocahontas” was a wild success, earning multiple Academy awards and over $300 million at the box office. It’s no surprise that this is what immediately comes to mind when you hear Pocahontas’ name. Certainly, movies based on true events tend to tweak details, but in this case, the Disney movie is a far cry from the truth.
Firstly, Pocahontas was not even the main character’s real name. She was named Matoaka, Pocahontas was merely a nickname that meant mischievous.
Another major difference is her age. While in the movie, Pocahontas appears to be in her late teens, about 18-19 years old, she was really a child when the English came, at most 10 years old. This change was done in order to make her romantic relationship with the 27-year-old John Smith seem less suspicious.
However, Matoaka never actually had a romance with John Smith in real life. They were merely friends because of her young age. Furthermore, John Smith was not always as friendly to the natives as the movie leads many to believe. According to the Indigenous foundation, “John Smith was feared by many Indigenous children in the area he was in, and was known to enter villages and hold various chiefs of tribes at gunpoint, demanding food and supplies.”
Instead, Matoaka’s famous romantic relationship was with John Rolfe and it ends up being more of a tragedy. She was forced into marriage with him during a trade between the colonists and her tribe. She already had a husband and child by this point but they had been killed by the colonists. Afterwards, she was kidnapped and forced aboard the English ship where she was forced to convert to Christianity and change her name to Rebecca.
They did have a child, which led to an era of peace called the “Pocahontas Peace” but once she arrived in England, she died almost immediately of tuberculosis at age 21.
Overall the only similarities between the movie and Matoaka’s real life are the facts that she was the chief’s daughter and she knew John Smith. Disney’s altered version of the story is more kid-friendly, but should be taken with a grain of salt, as it can erase the real, tragic details of what Matoaka and other native Americans had to deal with.
While the first Pocahontas film was much more popular, the sequel is still overly romanticized but more historically accurate, focusing more on her relationship with John Rolfe. (Photo/Flickr)
