Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma

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.

The mythical Pocahontas who loved John Smith, the English, the Christian faith, and London more than she loved her own father or people or faith or village deeply appealed to the settlers of James­town and the court of King James. That Pocahontas also inspired the romantic poets and patriotic myth-makers of the nineteenth century, as well as many twentieth-century producers of toys, films, and books. With one accord, all these storytellers subverted her life to satisfy their own need to believe that the Indians loved and admired them (or their cultural forebears) without resentments, without guile. She deserves better.

Many people in the modern world like to imagine that Native Americans were inexplicably and inherently different from Europeans—kinder, gentler, more spiritual—and that they instinctively chose not to deploy power in the same way. It is wishful thinking. The Indians were not essentially different from Europeans. Powhatan, who showed a sense of humor in his dealings with the newcomers, might well have laughed at our modern notions—if he did not use them to his advantage first.

When the two cultures met and entered a power struggle over land and resources, it would turn out that, unbeknownst to ei­ther side, they had been in something like a technological race for centuries. And the cultural heirs of people who had been full-time agriculturalists for eleven thousand years rather than a few hundred had already won.

None of this made an individual white man one whit more intel­ligent or more perceptive than an individual Indian—just better in­formed and better armed.

There is no question that John Smith and his peers— those who wrote such books, and those who read them— embraced a notion of an explorer as a conqueror who strode with manly steps through lands of admirers, particularly admiring women. […] The colonizers of the imagination were men—men imbued with almost mystical powers. The foreign women and the foreign lands wanted, even needed, these men, for such men were more than desirable. They were deeply good, right in all they did, blessed by God.

“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...” […]

These words may startle people who assume […] it never occurred to anyone that taking Indian land raised a moral issue. It is rare, though, that a great wrong is committed by one people against another without some among the perpetrators protesting the deed. Colonists made moral decisions, too. And some were adept at convincing themselves that whatever they wanted to do was indeed the right thing to do, whatever others might say.

It must be asked if anything remotely resembling what John Smith described could have occurred that December day in 1607. Unfortunately, the issue was thoroughly clouded by academics before it was eventually clarified by them. In the nineteenth century it became fashionable, amidst a certain circle of dignified white gentlemen scholars […] to denounce Smith as a braggart and a fraud. This caused those who loved him and his legend […] to rally to his cause and insist on his absolute veracity in every particular.

One element is beyond debate: at no point did Powhatan, Poca­hontas, or any of their people look on the strangers with wide-mouthed awe or consider them gods. Hernando Cortés never claimed that the Aztecs thought he was a god— as they almost certainly did not—yet the flattering notion became wildly popular in the after-the-fact accounts that appeared later in the century, several of which were widely available in England.

Was she really the one then closest to Powhatan’s heart, and did he believe that Smith would know this from his days of captivity and thus recognize her presence as a white flag? Or was she, as the daughter of a commoner and without claims to political power, among the children he could most afford to lose, and thus the one whose safety he chose to risk? Or did he as a shrewd statesmen simply choose the daughter in whose abilities he had most confidence?

Namontack convinced Powhatan to accept the gifts… […] “But a fowle trouble there was to make him kneele to receave his crowne.” Smith asserted that this was because the Indian did not know the “meaning of a Crowne,” but in fact he probably understood only too well the gesture of kneeling to receive a crown at the hands of another. He himself, after all, liked the practice of anointing tributary werowances who were bound to do his bidding. “At last by leaning hard on his shoulders, he a little stooped, and Newport put the Crowne on his head.”

Did [John Rolfe] and his wife look at the promised violence from the Indians’ point of view? Possibly. Did they believe they were fulfilling God’s will? Probably. Did they hope to become great merchant traders? Most certainly.

[Pocahontas] had been living with the English long enough to have begun to grasp the resources they had at their disposal. If her people were to survive, they needed the English as allies, not as enemies. How did an Algonkian noblewoman build an alliance? In a time-honored custom, she married with the enemy and bore children who owed allegiance to both sides. […] At home she was not truly royal: her mother had been no one important, so […] nor­mally [Pocahontas] would not have been considered eligible for a politically significant match… […] These English people, though, thought she was a princess and were willing to treat her accordingly, thus raising her status in her own people’s eyes as well.

The [Biblical] name Rebecca was almost certainly Whitaker’s choice. […] By Isaac, Rebekah con­ceived twins […] Re­bekah favored [Jacob] the pale son over [Esau] the red one [and] it is more than likely that Whitaker thought the parallel perfect. Pocahontas’s children would be by na­ture both Indian and Christian, both red and pale. […] If Whitaker read the story this way, however, Pocahontas likely did not. She could easily have focused her attention on the passages narrated from the perspective of Rebekah’s people, in which […] her siblings bless her for being willing to go and bear children among the enemy.

Pocahontas became Rebecca. She would not have found the idea of a renaming traumatic: it was in keeping with her culture for her to change her name as she proceeded through her life and had new ex­periences. Men, in fact, said that they aspired to earning many names, and women may well have, too.

The Virginia Company’s standing was precarious. Even as Sandys prepared the Lady Rebecca to meet London society, the company was involved in several lawsuits. […] The organization’s financial situation would remain shaky until the general public became convinced that Virginia was truly a land of promise. Naturally, tobacco shipments would be critical, but to raise a significant crop the company first needed to convince po­tential settlers and investors that the Indians were not bloodthirsty savages.

It would not have taken [Pocahontas] long to realize that friend and foe alike held at least one notion in common: she was to them a model, a stick figure, representing a race that was either barbaric or charming, or both, depending on their perspective, but never simply human.

It would be too simple to say that she faced hatred. The British were fascinated by her, adored her exoticism. At first it probably seemed flattering. Only later would she have begun to experience the psychological costs of being a symbol rather than a person.

Attanoughskomouck? It was always a struggle to capture an Indian word phonetically, but the word that the English represented elsewhere as “Tsenacomoc(o)”—that is, the Indians’ name for their own country—clearly peeps out of the confusion. […] This rendition was obviously the result of Matoaka’s sound­ing it out for a Dutchman, just as it was undoubtedly the woman herself who insisted on using the name Matoaka rather than her more famous and attention-grabbing nickname, which everyone else was using. She knew Pocahontas was a name for a child; they did not.

Indeed, the initial report written in the colony about the “barbarous massacre” made the claim that in the long run, the event was a net positive: at last the colonists were free to remove the Indians and take the country for themselves… […] In words reminiscent of a modern-day killer who claims he would never have hurt his victim […] if she had not been foolish enough to struggle, the colonial chronicler continued to insist it had never been his choice to fight, even as he loaded his gun and drew on his armor. The policy of extermination had been born.

The destruction of Virginia’s Indian tribes was not a question of miscommunication and missed opportunities. […] It is unfair to imply that somehow Pocahontas, or Queen Cockacoeske, or others like them could have [singlehandedly] saved their people. […] There is nothing they could have done that would have dramatically changed the outcome: a new nation was going to be built on their people’s destruction. […] They did not fail. On the contrary, theirs is a story of heroism as it exists in the real world, not in epic tales.