Throughout Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, Townsend seeks to show her readers how communication between the Algonkian tribes of the Tsenacomoco region and the English settlers who arrived on their lands in the early 1600s functioned—and failed. In addition to examining the practical challenges of communication and language, Townsend also dives into the power imbalances which result from the fact that the Algonkian tribes had not yet developed a formal written language when the English arrived. Because the records of this time period that still exist today are largely composed by the colonizers themselves, Townsend suggests that only one side of the story has been preserved. Power, she argues, is granted to those whose voices are most greatly amplified.
“History is written by the victors,” goes the popular aphorism. In Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, Townsend shows how the white colonizers who ventured to the New World razed the Powhatan people’s lands and annihilated their culture using language and communication (or lack thereof) to establish power over them. Over the years, this power imbalance enabled the English to tell the story of colonizing the Tsenacomoco tribes from their own perspective in a way that further solidified their disproportionate power. In one example of the ways in which language and communication can confer—or strip—power from a group, Townsend relays an anecdote about Thomas Harriot. Harriot was a mathematician and linguist who traveled to the English colony at Roanoke in 1590 and, upon his return to England, published a book about his travels. Townsend writes that though Harriot took care to learn some of the local tribes’ languages, take detailed notes about their ways of life, and “clearly respected many of the people he met and understood that a lack of technology did not imply shortcomings in intelligence,” his report ultimately encouraged “enthusiastic backers of colonization.” Harriot’s published work described the Algonkian tribes as “a people poore, and for want of skill and judgement.” He categorized the tribes he met as desirous of the “friendship and love” of the English—a submissive people who took joy in “pleasing and obeying” their colonizers. The example of Harriot’s early travelogue shows how language and communication effectively equate with—and even create—power. Though Harriot may have known that the things he was writing were false, he wrote them anyway, and his words were used as justification to continue colonizing the region. By categorizing the tribes he met as submissive, “poore,” and sycophantic groups who loved the English and hoped only to please them, he stripped them of their voices, erased their actual wants and needs, and fueled the fervor for colonialism.
Yet another example Townsend cites in her exploration of the ways in which language and communication are intermixed with power concerns Pocahontas herself. In May of 1608, the English settlers at Jamestown seized several Indian hostages, likely from the Paspahegh tribe. Three days into the men’s captivity, Powhatan sent his daughter Pocahontas—then only 10 years old—along with an advisor of Powhatan’s whose name may have been “Rawhunt,” or something phonetically similar. The historical record implies that Rawhunt spoke to the settlers in Algonkian while Pocahontas translated with the help of Thomas Savage, a young Englishman and ward of Powhatan. The negotiation was successful, and according to reports, Pocahontas spent time visiting and speaking with colonists and prisoners alike. The visit was her first of many to the colony, and Pocahontas’s language skills grew over the years. As they did, Townsend writes, she became “every more powerful” and important not only to the colonists, but to her father as well. Pocahontas has been regarded throughout the years as a pivotal figure in early relations between the Powhatan and the English. While claims of her specialness to Powhatan, her love of the English people, her desire to convert to Christianity, and her love of English men have all been greatly exaggerated, this anecdote represents a seed of truth as to why Pocahontas has become such an iconic and indeed powerful figure of history. Pocahontas’s youth and ability to absorb a new language made her a vital political tool for both her own people and the English—as a translator and an arbiter of language, she grew in power and status. Townsend uses this anecdote to further her argument about the rewards—and demands—of using language and communication as an inroads to power, however wittingly or unconsciously one may so do. Though Townsend later complicates and interrogates how much “power” and agency Pocahontas actually had in her lifetime (and has now in the contemporary cultural imagination), she uses this example to hammer home just how valued and indeed revered the ability to possess and harness language truly was in the tenuous early days of colonization in the New World.
Throughout the book, Townsend attempts to give voice to the voiceless. By recognizing the advantage the Virginia Company (the company chartered by King James I to establish a colony in Virginia) had over the Algonkian tribes, who had no written language, Townsend dissects the ways in which the colonizers themselves—and their compatriots back in England—used language and communication to broadcast to the world (and to future generations) their side of the story. Townsend knows that because “history is written by the victors,” it is the responsibility of historians and academics to challenge the received facts of human history and discover the truth behind the language used to disseminate them throughout the world.
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Language, Communication, and Power ThemeTracker
Language, Communication, and Power 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.
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.
“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.
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.
