38 pages • 1 hour read
Camilla TownsendPocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Myths and Mythmaking
The movement of history, Camilla Townsend argues, is driven not only by fact and action but also by imagination. Myths
“can lend meaning to our days, and they can inspire wonderful movies. They are also deadly to our understanding. They diminish the influence of facts, and a historical figure’s ability to make us think; they diminish our ability to see with fresh eyes” (x).
Pocahontas is notable for the power of her myths. The historical person has been almost consumed by the stories told about her, stories that reveal more about colonial ways of thinking than about her.
The myths of Pocahontas often reflect white male colonists’ anxieties and secret desires. In John Smith’s narrative, for instance, Pocahontas is presented, not as the relatively unimportant and uninfluential 10-year-old child, but as a nubile and pure-hearted babe, at once a “noble savage” and a desirable woman overcome by Smith’s own charms. Smith’s account exemplifies a frequent trend in colonial storytelling at the time and one that reflected a bigger metaphor underneath the machinery of colonialism: America itself as a fertile maiden awaiting the husbandly mastery of Europe.
The human habit of making individuals into symbols and myths means that the historian who wishes to get closer to reality needs to dig through both the myths of the past and the myths of the present. Townsend observes both the fantasizing of John Smith and his ilk and the ways in which her contemporaries—and she herself—may interpret history through their own cultural lenses. Part of the work of the historian is to become aware of one’s own lenses as well as others’, to preserve and to honor the real personhood of the dead.
Colonialism
Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma tackles the complexities of colonialism and the individuals whose decisions shaped colonial ambitions. Although it’s easy to reduce historical movements to universally held opinions—for instance, the idea that the English uniformly believed that they were a superior race, favored by God and tasked with civilizing less-fortunate peoples—Townsend argues that no group is monolithic, and she examines the doubts as well as the zeal of the English who came to the colonies.
Even those who argued in favor of colonialism questioned its morality:
“Even Robert Gray, the same pastor who envisioned the colonists as the army of God, acknowledged: ‘The first objection [to colonization] is, by what right or warrant we can enter in the land of these Savages, take away their rightfull inheritance from them, and plant ourselves in their places, being wronged or unprovoked by them’” (35).
Similarly, Reverend Whitaker, the pastor who took it upon himself to educate Pocahontas after her kidnapping, was unsurprised by her intelligence and respected her personhood, even as he tried to proselytize her into the Christian faith.
Colonialist thinking, as Townsend demonstrates, is not a zero-to-60 revving-up of instant dehumanization and scorn. It is an insidious process driven by deep-down cultural anxieties.
Names
Pocahontas’s name is so famous that it’s easy to forget that it’s not the name she would have called herself—at least, not after she grew up. She introduced herself as Matoaka; when she married John Rolfe, she was christened Rebecca; and the historical record suggests that, as was the tradition in her tribe, she also had a secret name known only to her parents and herself. Pocahontas was an affectionate childhood nickname.
Names, in Pocahontas’s culture, changed many times over the course of a life. One earned new names during big life transitions or in recognition of one’s actions and character. That we know Pocahontas as “Pocahontas”—the child’s name she had when she first met English people—carries serious symbolic weight. English naming customs and ideas freeze her in history as a 10-year-old child.
Pocahontas’s son was also significantly named. Christened “Thomas,” he was probably named for Sir Thomas Dale, who “had given [Pocahontas and John Rolfe] permission to marry and was essentially their patron” (131). This naming, likely an affectionate and grateful gesture, also acknowledges complicated power structures. Pocahontas’s child was given an English name, and not just an English name, but the name of a man without whom the boy would not have been given permission to exist—at least, not in a legally recognized way.
Naming has always bestowed both identity and power. John Smith’s invented story of a beautiful Indian princess keeps Pocahontas stuck in posterity as her childhood self. The continued use of her childhood name overshadowed her adult accomplishments as both Matoaka and Rebecca and perpetuated the myth of an Indian maiden persuaded by the superiority of English culture.
