Disney wants you to believe Pocahontas is a love story. A girl, a boy, a forbidden romance, and a few talking animals to keep things light. But the truth? This movie is a colonization starter pack wrapped in a sing-along soundtrack. It’s not love they’re selling — it’s survival disguised as romance. And survival, for me, is the real love story.
And here’s the thing no one told me as a kid:
violence is the first resource of white culture.
The Inheritance of Violence: Conquest Upon Conquest
The Vikings didn’t raid for the thrill of it — they raided because they had to. They turned survival tactics into a lifestyle. And that lifestyle? It got baked into Europe’s DNA. By the time the English came stomping into Powhatan territory, conquest wasn’t just what they did — it was who they were. To understand how that identity formed, we have to widen the frame. The Vikings were one chapter in a longer story of conquest that stretched from Rome to Normandy.
When we talk about the Vikings, we can’t look at them in isolation. They were part of a much longer cycle of power, resistance, and cultural exchange that shaped Europe. The Romans built their empire not just through conquest but through assimilation. Roads, laws, and aqueducts bound together the lands they seized, pulling people into a system that outlasted its rulers. The Gauls — fierce Celtic tribes of what is now France — resisted Rome with fire and fury, only to be absorbed and transformed, their culture pressed into the Roman mold but never fully erased.
The Germanic tribes that followed — Goths, Vandals, Franks, Saxons — destabilized and eventually toppled Rome, carrying forward fragments of its legacy while reshaping Europe in their own image. The Huns thundered in from the steppes, forcing migrations and new alliances that further unsettled the balance. Into this shifting landscape came the Vikings — not builders of empire in the Roman sense, but raiders, traders, and settlers who carved their mark through movement and disruption. Their voyages stretched from North America to Byzantium, leaving behind sagas and place-names as proof of their reach.
And then, almost as if history were folding in on itself, the Normans emerged — descendants of those same Vikings, but now steeped in French language and culture. With William the Conqueror, they brought a synthesis of Viking ferocity and Roman order back to Britain, proving that conquest is never a clean slate but a layering of what came before. And that’s the inheritance the English carried to Powhatan shores: not a culture rooted in belonging, but a tradition of taking — layering conquest upon conquest until control itself became the only legacy.
That cycle of taking — conquest upon conquest — left its mark. And that’s why white supremacy has never been about pride of culture There is no rooted culture to hold. It’s pride of control. Conquer first, justify later. Dress it up in God, progress, gold — whatever keeps the story palatable.
The Opening Frames: Heroics at Sea
The first scenes of the movie tell you everything you need to know. John Smith, white-blond and square-jawed, leaps across a ship’s deck to save his crewmates as a storm rages. The men adore him, cheer for him, follow his lead. He’s instantly marked as “the man who can tame nature.”
And look at the way the crew is written: the moment things get hard, they falter. They’re ready to give up, to throw in the towel. But Smith? He keeps pressing forward, even when facing the ocean’s chaos. This is supposed to mark him as brave. But it also ties him to an older story: the Viking hero, the conqueror whose survival depends not on harmony with the elements, but on dominating them.
This framing skips the reality: surviving those ocean voyages was brutal. Months at sea meant disease, starvation, mutiny, death. But Disney cuts all that away to show a simplified truth: only the strongest, most heroic, most violent men endure.
The Subtext in the Storm
So before Pocahontas even appears, before we’ve heard a single note of “Colors of the Wind,” the film has already given us its thesis:
Violence + dominance = manhood.
Bravery = conquest.
The ocean itself must be tamed before the land can be claimed.
That’s not just a kid’s movie opening. That’s colonial conditioning in miniature.
The Colonizer Gaze & False Promises
Radcliffe’s first lines are pure theater: “freedom, prosperity, and adventure.” He’s not hauling ropes, not steering, not taking waves to the face. He’s barking slogans while perched above it all, his little dog tucked safely at his side. He sells the dream, but he doesn’t sweat.
That’s the scam baked into colonization: the people shouting the loudest about freedom are usually the ones least interested in doing the work to earn it. In 1607, most Englishmen weren’t starving for freedom — they were starving for opportunity. England was locked into a rigid class system. Land and power stayed in the hands of the nobility. The Virginia Company offered a shortcut: sail across the ocean, and you could own land, build wealth, be somebody.
The opening song, “Virginia Company,” is a recruitment jingle — an animated pamphlet. It promises gold, glory, and a new life, while erasing the risk: starvation, disease, mutiny, violent conflict. It’s the same false pitch the Virginia Company used in reality. Jamestown wasn’t about faith or freedom. It was a commercial gamble, a foothold for empire.
And here’s where it echoes closer to home. When I was in Tri-Cities, Washington, I learned the story of how that community was built. In the 1940s, the U.S. government lured people there with promises of steady work, housing, and patriotic duty. Families uprooted their lives for what sounded like a chance at stability. The truth? They were recruited to help build the Hanford site, producing plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
Jamestown in 1607, Tri-Cities in 1943 — different centuries, same playbook:
Sell the dream. (Freedom, prosperity, jobs, patriotism.)
Exploit the workers. (Settlers in Jamestown, wartime laborers in Richland.)
Hide the real purpose. (Conquer land and people in one, conquer nations with nuclear fire in the other.)
Rewrite the story afterward. (Disney gives us a love ballad; Tri-Cities gets called “a hub of innovation.”)
False promises have always been the fuel for conquest. Whether it’s Radcliffe’s rallying cry, the Virginia Company’s propaganda, or the Hanford recruitment drive, the pattern is the same: dangle prosperity, extract labor, and conceal the true cost until it’s too late.
The Land Isn’t Empty, You’re Just Greedy
The first thing the English do when they arrive is build a fort. Not a trading post. Not a place of welcome. A fort. The message is clear: we are here to stay, and we will protect what we plan to take. To build it, they chop down trees, strip the earth, scar the landscape. Disney paints it as men working hard with songs in their throats. But the truth is, it’s an act of violence — one that echoes every military base planted on foreign soil ever since. A foothold is never just a foothold. It’s a claim.
The film tries to pass off this land as untouched, as if it’s just sitting there waiting to be “used.” That’s the lie of colonization: the myth of empty land. But the Powhatan Confederacy knew better. They had fields, fishing, trade, and governance. The forest wasn’t wasted space; it was medicine, home, spirit. The colonists didn’t see abundance — they saw property. They measured value in ownership, not relationship.
And this is where we see the virus for what it is. White power spreads like disease: crossing borders, mutating into new forms, hiding inside noble words like “freedom” and “adventure.” It feeds on what it didn’t create and leaves the host weaker for it. What’s worse, it teaches people to mistake sickness for strength. Cutting down trees becomes “progress.” Building a wall of muskets becomes “protection.” But what’s really happening is infection — land stripped, balance destroyed, futures stolen.
We are taught from childhood that nothing is free. Work hard, pay your dues, nothing comes without cost. And yet white power takes everything — land, lives, foodways, stories — without paying, without compensating, without even asking. Indigenous nations like the Powhatan in Virginia, or the Yakama, Nez Perce, Umatilla, and Wanapum in Washington State, were pushed off ancestral land without consent, without recompense, left to watch as their rivers were dammed, their soil poisoned, their access cut off. Some lifeways extinct, some nations fragmented, some languages silenced.
That isn’t balance. That isn’t power. That’s parasitism — a system where one survives only by draining the life from another. And yes, this is the evil we encounter every day: the imbalance baked into capitalism, into colonization, into white patriarchal supremacist greed. Survival today means living in a body, on land, in communities still scarred by this theft.
And just as colonization drained land and lifeways, patriarchy drains women of choice. Disney doesn’t stop at conquest — it sweetens the story by wrapping domination in marriage, romance, and obedience. That’s where Pot 2 begins.
But naming it is resistance. Naming it is medicine. Because the land was never empty, and the people were never silent. 💎