In Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, Townsend creates a new portrait of the woman most people know as Pocahontas—a widely-known historical figure whose agency, feelings, personality, and very words have been lost to history while other people’s accounts of and assumptions about her have proliferated through the ages. In telling Pocahontas’s story, Townsend seeks to restore justice and indeed agency to the Algonkian “princess.” Throughout the book, Townsend uses the story of Pocahontas to more broadly argue that for untold scores of women throughout history—especially women of color and women from oppressed cultural groups—the fact that agency was denied to them in their lifetimes unfortunately means that their stories will be posthumously corrupted and coopted.
Throughout the book, Townsend shows how Pocahontas struggled throughout her lifetime—in spite of her relatively privileged status as the daughter of the powerful paramount chief (or mamanitowik) Powhatan—to secure agency over her own choices in the face of colonialism. As Townsend shows in the book’s early chapters, many of the “facts” that exist in the collective cultural consciousness about Pocahontas are, in fact, myths. As Townsend explores the roots of these myths, she establishes how the falsehoods about Pocahontas that many people accept as truth in the modern day were actually sources of Pocahontas’s struggle for agency during her lifetime. For instance, though Pocahontas is widely believed to have been the favorite daughter of her powerful father, Powhatan, Townsend asserts that this favoritism did not exist—in fact, Pocahontas was the daughter of a common woman and thus likely quite expendable to her father for much of her life. Pocahontas had to strive, as her father before her did, for agency and power—she used her communication and language skills to secure her importance both to her own tribe and to the colonists. Colonial power over her people was becoming clearer by the day, and Pocahontas, in spite of her youth, no doubt understood that this meant a significant change to the landscape of her world.
Townsend examines how Pocahontas, during moments in which her power and agency were stripped from her completely, did all she could to retain some measure of control over her own fate. When Pocahontas was taken captive by the English when she was 15 or 16, Townsend describes how her captors later wrote that the young woman used silence as a tactic to get them to “wait upon her words” and heed her more carefully, even in spite of her disadvantaged position. Upon her arrival in Jamestown as a prisoner, Pocahontas attracted much attention from the colonists, who realized they had a “royal hostage.” She complied with their ideals of her, converting to Christianity at their behest and even marrying a relatively wealthy tobacco planter, a widower named John Rolfe. Pocahontas, Townsend suggests, strategized throughout her captivity not just to keep herself alive, but to actively advance her social position among the colonists. By appearing to eagerly adopt their language, religion, and customs—and by using her father’s own political strategy in marrying someone from another “tribe” and begetting a child, Thomas Rolfe, who might hold allegiance to both parents’ peoples—Pocahontas did manage to wrestle a measure of agency for herself out of a terrible situation.
Townsend also goes on to show how Pocahontas, stripped of her agency while alive and forced to wrest back what little power over herself she could, has also been denied agency in death through the corruption and commodification of her life story. As uncountable individuals from historians to Hollywood executives bastardize Pocahontas’s biography, each falsehood told about her life, her choices, and the reasons behind her actions further robs Pocahontas’s legacy of humanity and agency. Pocahontas’s story, Townsend asserts, is “a story of heroism as it exists in the real world, not in epic tales.” Yet over the years, the corruption of Pocahontas’s life story and what it says about colonialism, power, agency, and the struggle of women of color to survive in a world (which was, in Pocahontas’s time, quite literally ruled by white men) has resulted in a kind of retroactive loss. Pocahontas was not a naïve girl who fell in love with members of the company that killed and colonized her own people, nor was she a devout convert who eschewed her past in the name of accepting the Christian God into her life. Narratives that categorize Pocahontas as such, Townsend warns, continue to deny the truth of her life and disrespect the very real difficulties Pocahontas endured in order to do the best with the hand she was dealt. Pocahontas died in England after having been brought to London to be shown off at court as Rebecca Rolfe—a “princess” who chose an English man and a Christian life over her own people. Townsend argues that it is wrong to assert that Pocahontas willingly chose such circumstances out of anything other than an iron-willed desire to, in whatever way she could, broadcast her people’s humanity to a racist and uncaring group of colonizers. Perpetuating anything to the contrary means retroactively continuing to strip Pocahontas of her agency in death by willfully misinterpreting the reasoning behind her complicated, calculated choices in life.
Even though one may be denied agency in life, Townsend suggests, there is still a glimmer of hope that the truth of one’s stories, choices, and actions may be restored. When this fails to happen—as it did for centuries and still often does in Pocahontas’s case—Townsend argues that this failure comes to represent a continued theft of agency.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Women, Agency, and History ThemeTracker
Women, Agency, and History 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.
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.
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?
“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.
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.
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.
