Gumby Cartoon - Pokey's Price

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I1jksPYZPc

I saw a clip of a Gumby cartoon on youtube. After seeing just a clip of it, I decided to watch the whole episode. In the episode called the Pokey’s Price, Gumby, the main character, and Pokey, a horse, travel back to pilgrim times at Plymouth, Massachusetts. The two discover that the pilgrims are starving. Pokey happens to come across to baskets of corn and gives them to the colony. But suddenly Native Americans arrive on the seen and want to be paid for their corn. The Indians that Pokey will do as a payment. When Gumby and the pilgrims go back to get Pokey, they shoot at the Indians, which then give Pokey back and settle for a few knives and beads in exchange. I choose this cartoon because I used to watch it as a child and was curious as to what I was exposed to at a young age.

The first thing that came to my mind after viewing this cartoon was the ideas mentioned in chapter 2 The “Tempest” in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery of the book A Different Mirror by Ronald Takaki. Takaki talked about the origins of the term “savage”. It originally started with the Irish being classified as savages by the English simple because of their daily actions and level of intelligence. From there though, the term related more to color of a person’s skin. The Native Americans were the next ones to be called savages. In the Gumby cartoon, the Indians were shown “savages” by being depicted as not knowing how to speak the English language correctly, violent by shooting arrows, and greedy by not sharing with the pilgrims. The Native Americans were seen negatively in this cartoon with the pilgrims not being at fault at all, which in fact it completely the opposite.

Both Takaki and Zinn in their writings talked about how the Native Americans were treated unfairly by Europeans. In Zinn’s chapter 1 Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress in his book A People’s History of the United States, he talked about how the native people were tortured, beaten, and even killed for Columbus’ profit. The Indians’ land, food, and resources were all taken from them, which they received no payment for. Zinn tried to get the reader to understand that history has different points of view; all of which need to be looked at to see whole event and not just one side of it. The cartoon showed a kind caring white community, which is not true when looking at the historical facts around how the United States started, which is obviously from the whites view of the event. Indians on the other hand would see it a completely different way.

I was appalled seeing this cartoon. I remember growing up and loving to watch this show after school. The more I look back at my childhood, the more I realize that I was taught all along to believe that the pilgrims and the Native Americans were friends who helped each other out. By becoming more knowledgeable, it sickens me to see a cartoon like this where the Native Americans were stereotyped as being dumb and violent. I hope that children will learn at a younger age what really took place during those times.