Pocahontas and Settler Colonialism in Early Film, 1907– 1910

This article examines promotional material linked to Pocahontas, Child of the Forest (Edwin S. Porter, 1907) and Pocahontas (director unknown, 1910), placing them in the wider debates about colonialism, film exhibition, authenticity, and the role of film as an educational medium in the early 1900s. Since its emergence, cinema played a pivotal role in promulgating the ideas of assimilation into dominant, white Protestant values. As American society was becoming increasingly heterogeneous, Pocahontas, an Indigenous woman central to the national mythologies of the United States, offered a problematic model of cultural integration.