Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma

Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma

Townsend, Camilla. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma. New York: Hill and Wang,

The figure of Pocahontas, the Native American princess who saved the English explorer John Smith from certain death at the hands of her father Powhatan, and married another Englishman she later came to love, has become an enduring myth of the early days of the Americas. Her life has been used to highlight both the native and White tensions endemic to the early colony, as well as to unfairly portray native tribes as savages. The romance of Pocahontas and Smith has become the subject of Disney cartoons and motion pictures, all highly inaccurate according to the historian Camilla Townsend, whose new book Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, attempts to shed some light upon the history behind the myth. According to Townsend, Pocahontas was "a real and complicated" individual, in contrast to how she is usually portrayed (xi). Both defenders of Pocahontas and her critics from Europe shared one thing 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" (143). The author strives to bring some humanity to this shadowy persona, as well as to contextualize her life within her tribe and the colony of Jamestown.

Townsend admits that in reconstructing the life of Pocahontas, she faces many difficulties, including the fact that Pocahontas came from a non-literate society that left no formal records, and that the settlement of Jamestown and the records of Smith cannot always be relied upon as a true and fair depiction of what Indians were 'like' at this time. However, she believes that the relationship of the tribes of the area were more complex than that of two people who were at war, who suddenly were brought to a truce by Pocahontas. Sometimes, the Indians would provide the colonists with food, as the people of Jamestown were struggling in the new climate and the demands the settlement made upon their fortitude, although for a time Powhatan began to kill the men who openly came begging for food, in an attempt to make the colonists go home (96).

Smith particularly suffered, because he was forced to lead a band of men who had largely come from the gentleman class back in England, and who were thus not accustomed to working with their hands, and regarded the physical, manual labor needed to survive in the harsh conditions of Jamestown as beneath their capacities. The first American settlers were not men who longed to breathe free and become self-made men; they had no desire to work the land. Instead they wished to create a little England where they would be "lords" on new manors and in the absence of lower-class whites, according to the racial norms of the day, turn the native populace into a new caste of laborers (xi).

Townsend's depiction of the likely attitudes of the early Jamestown settlers shows them in a particularly poor light, and makes Pocahontas and her father's later receptivity to their struggles especially poignant. In the literature the colonists had been exposed to before traveling to the Americas, Indians were characterized as savages who should be converted to Christianity, and the land they lived upon was seen as open land, ripe for the taking, because the Native Americans populated the lands like wildlife, rather than truly owning the country (90). Thus the founding of Jamestown was an openly colonizing act, designed to dispossess the natives from the soil. Ironically, one might argue, the reason for the failure of Jamestown as a colony was that the land took possession of the colonists and eradicated them from the inside out -- unbeknownst to the settlers, the water was filled with parasites, and was also unpalatably salty, and soon the death toll rose from what the colonists called "the bloody flux" or unceasing diarrhea (50).

Using the story of Pocahontas with which to present the Jamestown story is especially useful given that it exposes the sexual as well as the racial biases of the early settlers. The early settlers were fascinated by the marriage practices of the natives, and John Smith insisted that Powhatan put away a wife as soon as she had given him a child, in other words, that the tribal leader was polygamous (16). Townsend wryly notes "Pocahontas worked," taking care of her many younger brothers and sisters of her father. Amongst the natives, "everybody worked," even one of the favored king's daughters, unlike the settlers (17). This was viewed by the settlers not as uplifting to the soul however, but as a negative, given that they came from a society where those who did the least work, had the highest status. The hard work of the natives was seen as proof of their barbarity, just as much as their marriage practices.