Through the Eyes of Primary-Aged Native and Nonnative Children

• In Event: Roundtable Session 39
  In Roundtable Session: Cultural Studies of Children: Critical Perspectives on Childhoods, Popular Culture, and Consumerism

Abstract

Popular media has taken a commanding role in representing American Indians in ways that perpetuate racist stereotypes. Motion pictureshave unequivocally represented American Indians as objects of fascination, ridicule, and oppression. This study sought to understand ways in which Native and non-Native children made sense of popular media depictions of Native Americans, particularly in Disney films and branding. Findings reveal that the consumption of images heavily influences children’s perceptions and shapes their views of American Indian people.

Hollywood, which according to Giroux (2010) is “fundamentally driven toward exploiting public goods for private gain” (para. 1), has reached beyond its more local (U.S) viewers to impact audiences around the globe. Hollywood’s megacorporations and the films they produce are saturated with ideologies that have played a profound role in the shaping of individual identities and worldviews. Unlike static media, the “visual nature and mass appeal” (Vrasidas, 1997, p. 63) of film has reinforced long-standing stereotypes and reconstructed identities and histories that have little to do with reality. While stereotypes have existed long before filmic developments, negative depictions of American Indians have become amplified and crystallized as a result of the media and technological advances.

Negative stereotypes of American Indians living animalistic, drunken, and dirty existences continue to be propagated to national and international audiences. Such images are nearly always juxtaposed with the white man’s superiority (Vrasidas, 1997), and these dual images “reproduce hegemonic norms, values and beliefs” (Frymer, Kashani, Nocella II, & Heertum, 2010, p. 2).

While stereotypical depictions of American Indians as bloodthirsty savages are less prevalent today, contemporary texts like Disney’s Pocahontas continue to reproduce stereotypes in a less explicit yet no less dangerous form. The producers of Pocahontas, the Walt Disney Company, hiding behind a “titanium-clad image” (Giroux, 2010, para. 6) of perceived innocence and family entertainment, creates films that place young viewers in fictitious and fantastical settings while impressing damaging preconceptions on young minds. Carrying more weight because of the commonplace and thus “normalized” appearance of Disney in daily life and via its popularity and transmission to global audiences, “Disney routinely co-opts local histories, with little concern for the corresponding social, political, geographical contexts . . . which it sells to the consumer as American truth, culture and fact…” (Schaffer, 1996).

While some research has investigated how children negotiate the race and identity and others integrate children’s voices in the literature, few scholars have interviewed primary-age children (ages 7-9 years) on the subject of their own identities (and the identity of others) in relation to Hollywood’s hidden curriculum. A comparative analysis of interviews with American Indian children living on tribal land and Anglo children living in an urban setting provides an inroad for this author to understand how Disney’s curriculum is part of a larger relational dynamic and to examine how identities of children are shaped by popular visual culture. Through a critical analysis of thematic content from discussions with children and analysis of children’s drawings, this paper contributes to scholarship on the intersection of popular media, race and identity.

Author

• Dawna Holiday, Arizona State University