Tsenacomoco Term Analysis

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.

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.

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.