🔥 Weekly U.S. Badass: Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman was born Araminta “Minty” Ross around 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, enslaved from birth. She endured savage beatings, starvation, and backbreaking labor before she was even a teenager. As a child, she was hired out to violent households where she was whipped for not understanding orders and lashed for “stealing” sugar. One day, when she stood between another enslaved person and an overseer, she was struck in the head by a two-pound iron weight. The blow cracked her skull, caused seizures and vivid visions for the rest of her life — and it made her unbreakable.
In 1849, she escaped slavery on foot using the Underground Railroad — a network of safe houses operated by abolitionists. But Tubman didn’t just run to freedom. She returned to Maryland over a dozen times, risking her life to lead at least 70 enslaved people to freedom, including family members. She didn’t just navigate by the North Star. She used secret codes in spirituals, forged papers, and her unmatched knowledge of terrain to outwit bounty hunters and slave patrols. She never lost a passenger. And yes — she carried a pistol, partly to protect the group, partly to convince those who panicked that turning back wasn’t an option.
The U.S. government labeled her a criminal. Slave owners offered a $40,000 bounty for her capture — dead or alive. She responded by becoming more elusive and more militant. She worked with William Still, Frederick Douglass, and a network of Black and white abolitionists, building escape routes through Delaware and Pennsylvania.
During the Civil War, Tubman served as a Union Army nurse, treating wounded Black soldiers and escaped slaves with herbal remedies and limited medical supplies. She then became a scout and spy for the Union, gathering intel behind Confederate lines in South Carolina. In 1863, she led the Combahee River Raid alongside Colonel James Montgomery — an armed assault on a string of plantations. Tubman coordinated troop movements and river navigation, helping liberate more than 700 enslaved people and destroying Confederate infrastructure. This was the first U.S. military raid in history led by a woman. She wasn’t issued a weapon. She took one anyway.
After the war, Tubman returned to Auburn, New York. Despite her wartime heroism, she was denied a military pension for decades and lived in poverty. She sold vegetables and gave speeches to support herself and her community. She opened the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged in 1908 — using donations and what little money she had — to care for elderly and destitute African Americans. She continued fighting for justice, joining the women's suffrage movement and advocating for the rights of Black women, long ignored by the white-led suffragists of the time.
Tubman died in 1913, likely in her early 90s, surrounded by those she’d spent her life serving. She was buried with military honors. She left behind no fortune, no estate, and no statue in her lifetime. But she lived a life of relentless resistance, tactical brilliance, and uncompromising moral clarity. She didn’t just lead people to freedom — she showed the world what freedom looked like in motion, armed with faith, fury, and a loaded pistol.
“I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more, if only they knew they were slaves.”
Disney’s Pocahontas is what happens when you give American colonial propaganda a paintbrush, a xylophone, and no adult supervision. This film is less of a love story and more of a goddamn crime scene with a soundtrack.
Let’s start with the basics: Pocahontas wasn’t even her real name. Her actual name was Matoaka. “Pocahontas” was a nickname that loosely meant “playful one,” and she only became known by it because the English couldn’t be bothered to learn her real one. Then, when they kidnapped her, they renamed her again. That’s how much the English respected her culture: not even enough to let her keep her name.
The Disney version turns a 12-year-old Indigenous girl into a spiritual sex symbol with wind powers and perfect hair, chasing butterflies and melting the heart of a dreamy colonizer (seriously, picture it for a second, this girl was TWELVE, its gross). In reality, John Smith was a 27-year-old mercenary who claimed she saved him from execution in some kind of noble savage ritual. But get this: Smith didn’t write that story down until years after she was dead. The only reason he ever became a romantic lead is because he necro-fanfic’d a child he hadn’t seen in a decade.
Historically, Matoaka was the daughter of Wahunsenacawh, the powerful chief of the Powhatan Confederacy. Her life wasn’t “running through forests singing ballads” — it was lived in the direct shadow of the English invasion of her people’s land. Her so-called love story began with her being *abducted by colonists* during a raid in 1613 when she was around 17. She was kept prisoner in Henricus, where English “missionaries” aggressively tried to reprogram her under the guise of religious education.
While in captivity, Matoaka was forcibly baptized, given a new name, fucking REBECCA (how white can we be here, assholes), and then married to tobacco baron John Rolfe (29 years old, again, what the actual fuck) — not out of romance, but as part of a PR stunt. Rolfe literally wrote letters explaining that his marriage to her would "advance the Christian kingdom." It wasn’t love. It was marketing.
Then the English carted her across the Atlantic like a colonial trophy, dressing her up and presenting her to King James I and English society as proof that the “savages” could be civilized. She was paraded at balls, luncheons, and parties, not as a guest, but as a mascot for conquest.
And when she started to express a desire to go home? She fucking *died.* Some say illness. Some say poisoning. What we know is that Matoaka never returned to the land of her birth. She was buried in Gravesend, England, in a foreign land under a foreign name, having been used, renamed, and erased.
Disney doesn’t just rewrite this story — it spins it into *romantic propaganda.* It turns child abduction, religious indoctrination, and cultural genocide into a windswept musical where genocide gets harmonies and the colonizer gets the girl. They turned *a goddamn hostage crisis* into a fucking love triangle.
“Colors of the Wind” might be catchy, but it’s covering up a story soaked in exploitation, child trafficking and rape, and white supremacy. It’s not just a lie. It’s a betrayal — a weaponized fairytale that trains kids to see colonization as a vibe.
Verdict? Disney didn’t just rewrite history. They slapped a talking tree on cultural genocide and called it a coming-of-age story. Oh, and a fucking raccoon.
The picture above features the only authenic portait (Simon van de Passe's Engraving, where she is dressed up in full English attire to show how civilized she now is) and an artist's rendering of what she likely looked like before held captive and white washed.
Stay tuned for our a weekly Cinema WTF where we completely disect films that turn atrocities into palatable kids movies with dreamy white dudes and hot ethnic chicks!