Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Cultural Myth vs. Historical Fact
Colonialism as Erasure
Language, Communication, and Power
Women, Agency, and History
Summary
Analysis
Camilla Townsend imagines what Pocahontas, upon arriving in England toward the end of her life, might have felt upon spying the grey country for the first time. Townsend implores her readers to recognize that Pocahontas “was a real person” long before she was a “myth” and “icon.” Myth, Townsend warns, is “deadly to our understanding” of truth.
Townsend writes that while popular culture has emphasized Pocahontas’s love of the English and the friendly relations between the English settlers who established Jamestown, the first British colony in the Americas to survive, the truth is something much darker: the settlers blackmailed, tortured, and killed the Algonkian-speaking tribes who surrounded their settlement, and seven took Pocahontas prisoner in hopes of bending her father, Powhatan’s, will. Pocahontas, Townsend says, “deserves better” than the fanciful myths that have sprung up around her. Pocahontas was brave, intrepid, and self-sacrificing in the face of racism, imprisonment, and the ravages of colonialism. In studying the true facts of her remarkable life, Townsend asserts, she hopes readers will learn not only about Pocahontas’s life, but about the realities of America’s past.
Townsend has a clear personal investment in securing a kind of retroactive justice for Pocahontas. She intends to do so by deconstructing the myths that have made Pocahontas a tool of mythmaking in white Christian culture for centuries. Not only was Pocahontas denied agency while she lived, Townsend suggests, but the ways history has obscured the truth of Pocahontas’s life has continued to disempower her even in death.
Themes
