Camilla Townsend is a renowned historian whose work relies heavily on the contextualization and interpretation of primary resources—firsthand documents such as letters, diaries, books, and articles. As such, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma bridges the gap between fact and fiction surrounding the settling of the Jamestown Colony and the Virginia Tidewater area, known to the native tribes of the region as Tsenacomoco. As Townsend sifts through the historical record, she seeks to annihilate the myths about Native Americans—specifically the Algonkian tribes united under the powerful chief Powhatan—that are commonly circulated in present-day America. The book aims to secure a kind of justice for the Indigenous individuals—namely, Pocahontas—whose stories have been inaccurately transformed over time. Townsend ultimately argues that historical facts about Native Americans have been obscured by myths that unfortunately try to justify or even celebrate the widespread violence that was inflicted upon the Indigenous peoples of the land now called the United States.
As a whole, Townsend seeks to correct the dominant myths about early relations between the Powhatan people and the white settlers who razed their lands and decimated their populations. “Storytellers subverted [Pocahontas’s] life to satisfy their own need to believe that the Indians loved and admired them (or their cultural forbears) without resentments […] She deserves better,” writes Townsend in the book’s preface. Throughout the book, she goes on to outline the ways in which “storytellers” throughout history have used myths of their own creation to, in Townsend’s words, “satisfy their own need[s]”—often in service of justifying ongoing colonization of the world or to excuse the evils of earlier colonial efforts. One of the major examples Townsend uses to illustrate this pattern of myth-making as political strategy concerns John Smith’s famed account of Pocahontas rescuing him from certain death by flinging herself on his prone body just as her father, widely known as Powhatan (so called for the group of tribes he conquered and brought together under his leadership), was about to strike and kill Smith with a club. This story, Townsend states, never took place. In fact, though Smith published two books about his exploits in Virginia in 1612, he did not mention the incident in either—he did not tell this story until 17 years later, in 1624, “in the wake of an Indian rebellion, at which point Powhatan’s kindred were viewed as the devil incarnate, and Pocahontas was suddenly being interpreted as exceptional among all her people.” Though Smith embellished and outright manufactured other parts of his tales of life among the Powhatan, Townsend points to this incident in particular as a crucial example of the ways in which destructive myths are perpetuated for political gain. Smith’s story about Pocahontas saving him from her brutal, backwards father gained traction because it allowed the English to continue envisioning the tribes of the New World as savages, among whom only a select few genuinely supported English colonists in America. According to Townsend, Smith created a story about Pocahontas in attempts to signal that there was virtue in the English people’s continued presence in America. In particular, this narrative justified English people’s continued destruction of the majority of the tribes living there—given Smith’s story’s “truth,” Native Americans would seek only to brutally kill settlers seeking to colonize the New World.
Townsend continues to deconstruct other myths about Pocahontas throughout the novel, and shows how each story has been used to construct a version of a person who was politically useful in propaganda and rhetoric about the English being justified in—or even deserving of—their ruthless dominion over the Tsenacomoco tribes. One of the most profound of these myths concerns Pocahontas’s status as a beloved princess with great power and social capital. Pocahontas is commonly described in the cultural imagination as the favorite daughter of Powhatan—the one who had been “closest to [his] heart” from her very birth. Historical record, however, suggests that Pocahontas likely had no special favor with her father. As a man with many wives (often taken for political gain) and the father of many children, Powhatan used his offspring in pursuit of political strategy between tribes. Sending Pocahontas to Jamestown on several occasions to communicate and negotiate with the Jamestown settlers was, in all likelihood, a “shrewd” move: Pocahontas’s mother was likely a commoner, and thus it would not have been a major loss had the colonists killed Pocahontas herself; it’s also possible that Pocahontas may simply have been the most adept at translating between English and her tribe’s Algonkian language. Again, Townsend shows how the English created a myth about Pocahontas as a special favorite of the Powhatan “king.” This myth has pervaded throughout history because it allows the English—and generations of individuals around the world who have benefited (and continue to benefit) from the ravages of colonialism—to see Pocahontas as having chosen the English people as her favorites, just as her father chose her as his. In light of this myth, Pocahontas’s political congress with the English could have been interpreted as some kind of mystical divine selection. If the favorite daughter of the most powerful king in the region was indeed repeatedly visiting Jamestown to communicate with the settlers, they may have seen themselves as being somehow willed to prosper and therefore justified in using violent force to achieve this success.
Pocahontas and the Powhatan people all “deserve better”—about this fact there is no doubt. However, throughout history, cultural and political leaders have done their true stories a great disservice by purposefully corrupting and commodifying them in service of what amounts to propaganda. According to Townsend, the idea that the Virginia Algonkian tribes welcomed white colonizers and even loved them has proliferated throughout American culture because of the majority-white U.S. population’s need to justify the evils upon which the country was founded. In Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, Townsend attempts to secure some measure of justice for the individuals whose stories and very lives were stripped from them, and to right the historical record by turning to facts—not stories.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Cultural Myth vs. Historical Fact ThemeTracker
Cultural Myth vs. Historical Fact Quotes in 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.”
“They concluded,” said Argall, “rather to deliver her into my hands, than lose my friendship.”
[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.
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.
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.
