The ‘Real Little Mermaid’ was Indigenous, w/ Šuŋgmánitu: The Lusíads (Portugal, 1572), Disney’s Little Mermaid (1989), Ponyo (2008)

The Rob Marshall–directed live-action Little Mermaid, which should be coming out this May, was buzzed up by a good old culture war psy-op of which the two sides were: 1. Errm, the real Little Mermaid was white! This is cultural appropriation of marginalized white settler bodies and spaces and voices!; 2. The Little Mermaid is a fictional character, dumbass! But it occurred to me that the modern image of the mermaid as seen in the Disney movie mostly derives from the Age of Exploration encounter between white male explorers and Indigenous women, on which a voluminous archive exists. Sometimes this involved denizens of feudal Europe having their minds blown by the complex galaxies of non–hetero-patriarchal deep kinship and community that exist in Indigenous societies where the family is not specialized to pass down private property. But most of the time we can see from diaries that they were just rolling up on Indigenous women and r*ping them, and in fact there is an entire canto of an epic poem celebrating this practice: Canto 9 of Camões’ Lusíads has the goddess Venus reward Vasco da Gama and his brave sailors for their labors in blasting and murdering their way into the Silk Road of the Indian Ocean by preparing a magical sex island for them where they can force themselves (only role-play! they swear) on a host of minor sea sprites whom she has gathered, Epstein-like, for this purpose. So the really remarkable thing is that the old Disney little mermaid was white! The sailor guy she falls in love with seems to be an explorer on the seven seas, but somehow he’s exploring places where there are white mermaids? Her whiteness is the only thing (quite artificially) keeping us from thinking about the colonial origins of this whole story as it exists in the modern imagination, making her only just a metaphor for accepting the role of housewife in the Disney style picket fence Lebensraum, etc. I am joined by Lakota organizer and podcaster Šuŋgmánitu of Chunka Luta, recently rebranded from Bands of Turtle Island.

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