In Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, the ravages of colonialism in the New World have only recently begun—but the violence and genocide to come haunt even the early meetings between the Algonkian tribes of the Tsenacomoco (now known as the Virginia Tidewater region) and the English settlers who arrive on their land in 1607. When the Virginia Company—the private company chartered by King James I of England to establish a colony in Virginia—arrived, the Algonkian tribes were on the verge of major sociological, political, and cultural leaps—but faced with the colonizers’ superior weaponry and determination to claim the land of the river basin as their own, the tribes were forced to focus solely on survival. Over the course of the book, Townsend outlines the relations between the settlers and the Tsenacomoco tribes, ultimately arguing that the forces of colonialism derailed centuries of the Algonkian tribes’ culture, politics, and technological advancements. As such, Townsend suggests that the forces of colonialism often effectively erase the culture and progress of the people they colonize.
Over the course of the book, Townsend turns to the historical record in order to outline the ways in which the arrival of white settlers from England forever derailed, depleted, and indeed erased the social, cultural, and technological progress of the Powhatan people—implying that other colonization efforts throughout history have had a similar effect. In the days of the legendary Pocahontas’s youth, Townsend writes, her people were on the cusp of major social and technological change. The historical record indicates that they were “beginning to feel the want of iron that might eventually have driven them to mine it.” Their farming practices (though begun only 300 years earlier after centuries of a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle) had advanced to a point at which iron tools were becoming necessary to keep up with the increasingly bountiful harvests of difficult-to-salvage root plants. The tribes, too, had begun to organize and streamline tribute payments which flowed to Powhatan, Pocahontas’s father and the mamanitowik (paramount chief) of the region, from the tribes he’d brought under his command—these tribute payments had begun to resemble a kind of taxation which would likely have soon begun to necessitate a calendar and writing system. While a written language or collective calendar had not yet emerged, the fact that Powhatan’s people did, according to Townsend, keep “pictoglyphic maps and […] noted quantities on notched sticks” suggests that they were prepared to take up tangible forms of record-keeping. The natives of the New World and their English colonizers, Townsend writes, had unknowingly been in “something like a technological race” for many centuries. Whereas the ancestors of the Virginia Company had been organized around an agriculturalist society for 11,000 years, however, the Algonkian tribes had only been farming for 300. The English, Townsend writes, had already won—and with the winds of chance on their side, they began to decimate the Powhatan people’s way of life and effectively bar them from ever making the advances on which their society had begun to verge. Townsend goes deeper and deeper into this example, noting later in the text that for centuries, many people—the English settlers themselves surely included—have seen the English’s comparative “technological power” as a code for their being “superior” in refinement or intelligence to the tribes they sought to conquer. Townsend clarifies that this racist line of thought, in addition to comprising the very myth-making which justifies and excuses the ravages of colonialism, ignores the fact that the English’s technological superiority stems from a twist of fate—“the presence or absence of suitable plant species thousands of years ago.” In other words, because the English’s long legacy of agriculturalism was largely due to the happenstance of living in a fertile region, this efficient system of growing food—and the stability it provided—allowed them to focus on developing other technologies. Townsend uses this instance of happenstance to argue that had the Powhatan tribes been given time and continued freedom, their own “technological power” would have made itself evident; it is the forces of colonialism which halted their progress as an agricultural society and erased their potential for the practical development and growth that surely would have come.
Throughout Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, Townsend outlines the ways in which English colonization of the so-called New World erased the long, complex, and beautiful histories of that world’s native population. She laments the fact that the colonization of a place always necessitates the dominion over and erasure of all that came before. Townsend writes that it is “unfair to imply” that Pocahontas or any lone individual could have stopped “a new nation [from being] built on their people’s destruction,” cementing her argument that colonization demands the obliteration of the colonized land’s people, history, and very soul.
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Colonialism as Erasure Quotes in Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma
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.
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.
“They concluded,” said Argall, “rather to deliver her into my hands, than lose my friendship.”
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.
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.
