By Ariel Scotti
New York Daily News
Eric Trump tweeted on Tuesday what appeared to be a comparison of President Donald Trump calling Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” to Disney’s profits from the movie celebrating the Native American hero.
“The irony of an ABC reporter (whose parent company Disney has profited nearly half a billion dollars on the movie ‘Pocahontas’) inferring that the name is ‘offensive’ is truly staggering to me,” Eric Trump’s tweet reads.
Eric Trump doesn’t seem to grasp that his father’s coopting of Pocahontas’ name and legacy to use as a belittling insult of Warren — during an event for Native American World War II heroes, no less — is offensive to many people, regardless of Disney’s profits from the 1995 animated movie.
“The reference is using a historic American Indian figure as a derogatory insult and that’s insulting to all American Indians,” said John Norwood, general secretary of the Alliance of Colonial Era Tribes.
The true story of Pocahontas, a Native American girl who strived for peace between her people and the European settlers in the 17th century, was transformed by Disney into one of its classic princess movies that highlighted her kindness and bravery.
In the film, Pocahontas is depicted as an adventurous girl who loves and respects nature, her tribe and her family. She encounters John Smith, a handsome young white man who sailed to her native land from Europe in order to settle it and build a colony. Pocahontas teaches Smith about her culture and how his people’s industrial goals for her forest would ruin it and everything that lives there.
Through her passion and his goodhearted nature, they fall in love but their budding relationship is threatened by the settlers’ greed and Pocahontas’ tribe’s — led by her father — need to defend itself. Smith saves her father’s life at the end of the movie and is badly injured in the process, forcing him to return to Europe, leaving Pocahontas behind.
While the invasion of her land by the settlers of Jamestown, Va., is true, the movie conveniently glosses over the negative aspects of Pocahontas’ life — like the historical accounts that say she was married off to a white man old enough to be her father when she was a teenager, how she was referred to as a “noble savage” for the short years of her adult life in her 20s before she got sick and died, and how her family was killed off and her culture was mostly destroyed.
The movie earned almost $30 million at the box office its opening weekend, ultimately making just over $346 million worldwide.
Trump has repeatedly referred to Warren as Pocahontas since he was campaigning for the presidency, challenging her claim that she is of Native American heritage.
“You were here long before any of us were here,” Trump said Monday to Navajo code talkers at a White House ceremony meant to honor their service. “Although we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas.”
His statement was especially troubling for the National Congress of American Indians, the largest group for Native American tribes in the U.S.
“We regret that the president’s use of the name Pocahontas as a slur to insult a political adversary is overshadowing the true purpose of today’s White House ceremony,” NCAI President Jefferson Keel, a Vietnam War veteran, said in a statement.
