Pocahontas

‘Were you not afraid to come into my father's country and caused fear in him and all his people (but me) and fear you here I should call you "father"?’

 

Pocahontas (born Matoaka, known as Amonute, c. 1596 – 1617) was a Native American woman notable for her association with the colonial settlement at Jamestown, Virginia.

Pocahontas was the daughter of Chief Powhatan, paramount chief of Tsenacommacah, an alliance of about 30 Algonquian-speaking groups and petty chiefdoms in Tidewater, Virginia.  Her mother's name and origin are unknown, but she was probably of lowly status and is not considered to have died in childbirth. The oral tradition of the Mattaponi Reservation, descendants of the Powhatans claims that Pocahontas's mother was the first wife of Powhatan, and that Pocahontas was named after her.

According to colonist William Strachey, "Pocahontas" was a childhood nickname meaning "little wanton" or "playful one.’. She received this nickname as she was known for playing with the young boys at the Jamestown fort.  Her original name was Matoaka, but this was kept from the English owing to the belief that if they knew her real name, they could cause her harm. Pocahontas revealed her birth name to the colonists "only after she had taken another religious—baptismal—name" of Rebecca.

Pocahontas is often portrayed as a princess in popular culture. However, while she was beloved by her father, she would not have stood to inherit his title which would have passed first to his brothers and sisters rather than his children: ‘His kingdom descendeth not to his sonnes nor children: but first to his brethren, whereof he hath three…and after their decease to his sisters. First to the eldest sister, then to the rest: and after them to the heires male and female of the eldest sister; but never to the heires of the males.’.

Pocahontas is most famously linked to colonist Captain John Smith, who arrived in Virginia with 100 other settlers in April 1607 and first met Pocahontas when she was around ten years old. There were numerous encounters between the settlers and the natives – some amicable some hostile over the first few months. In late 1607, Smith was captured by Powhatan's close relative Opechancanough. In his 1608 account, Smith describes a great feast followed by a long talk with Powhatan, where it was believed Powhatan tried to bring the colonists under his control. Smith does not mention Pocahontas in relation to his capture, and claims they first met months later.

In 1616, Smith wrote a letter to Queen Anne of Denmark ahead of Pocahontas's visit to England. In this new account, his included the threat of his own death during captivity: "at the minute of my execution, she hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine; and not only that but so prevailed with her father, that I was safely conducted to Jamestown." He expanded on this in his 1624 Generall Historie, published long after the death of Pocahontas: ’… being ready with their clubs, to beate out his braines, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death." Karen Ordahl Kupperman suggests that Smith used such details to embroider his first account, thus producing a more dramatic second account to bolster Pocahontas’ reputation, and his own having recently fallen from favour.

Early histories did establish that Pocahontas befriended Smith and the Jamestown colony. She often went to the settlement and played games with the boys there. When the colonists were starving, Pocahontas brought them food ‘that saved many of their lives that else for all this had starved with hunger." She also saved the lives of Smith and other colonists in a trading party in January 1609 by warning them of an ambush. However, the colony’s expansion was soon viewed as a threat by the Powhatans and hostilities soon resurfaced. In late 1609, John Smith was forced to return to England for treatment of a gunpowder injury. The Powhatans were told that he had died, ending Pocahontas’ visits to Jamestown after which relations deteriorated rapidly

‘motivated not by the unbridled desire of carnal affection, but for the good of this plantation, for the honour of our country, for the Glory of God, for my own salvation… namely Pocahontas, to whom my hearty and best thoughts are, and have been a long time so entangled…’

In Marcy 1613, Pocahontas was captured by colonists during the First Anglo-Powhatan War. She was held her for ransom to demand her father returned colonial prisoners and stolen weapons and tools. Powhatan returned the prisoners but did not present an adequate number of weapons. A long standoff ensued, during which the colonists kept Pocahontas captive.

During the year-long wait, little is known about her life, although colonist Ralph Hamor wrote that she received "extraordinary courteous usage". Some oral traditions claim that Pocahontas was raped, but historians believe this would have been counterintuitive to the colonial agenda and risked provoking the wrath of the tribe. During her captivity, Pocahontas was taught Christianity and English by a minister who baptised her as “Rebecca”.

In March 1614, the stand-off escalated to a violent confrontation between hundreds of colonists and Powhatan men. The colonists allowed Pocahontas to talk to her father, whom she reportedly chastised for valuing her "less than old swords, pieces, or axes". She said that she preferred to live with the colonists "who loved her".

Mattaponi tradition holds that Pocahontas's first husband was Kocoum, who was killed by the colonists after his wife's capture in 1613. Today's Patawomecks believe that Pocahontas and Kocoum had a daughter named Ka-Okee who was raised by the Patawomecks after her father's death and her mother's abduction. However, Kocoum's identity, location, and very existence have been widely debated among scholars for centuries.

During her captivity, Pocahontas met the recently-widowed colonist John Rolfe, who had established a tobacco farm in Virginia. Rolfe was a pious man and agonized over the potential moral repercussions of marrying a “heathen”, despite Pocahontas/Rebecca’s conversion to Christianity.  In seeking permission to marry her, he expressed his love for Pocahontas and his belief that he would be saving her soul: The couple were married in 1814 and had a son Thomas in January 1615.

The marriage was controversial at the time because "a commoner" had "the audacity" to marry a "princess".  However, the union succeeded in bringing peace between the colonists and Powhatan's tribes; it endured for eight years as the "Peace of Pocahontas". In 1615, Ralph Hamor wrote, "Since the wedding we have had friendly commerce and trade not only with Powhatan but also with his subjects round about us." 

‘I tell you then I will, and you shall call me child, and so I will be for ever and ever your countryman.’

 

One of the Virginia Company of London’s main objectives was to convert Native Americans to Christianity, and the company saw the marriage as an opportunity to promote further investment. It was decided to send Pocahontas and her husband to England as a symbol of the tamed New World "savage" and the success of the Virginia colony. They arrived in England in June 1616. It was here that Pocahontas learned that John Smith was alive and living in London. He subsequently wrote to Queen Anne of Denmark, the wife of King James, urging that Pocahontas be treated with respect as a royal visitor. He suggested that, if she were treated badly, her "present love to us and Christianity might turn to… scorn and fury", and England might lose the chance to "rightly have a Kingdom by her means". Pocahontas was consequently entertained at various social gatherings and was even introduced to King James himself.  

While Pocahontas was not a princess in her own culture, she was presented as such to the English public so that she would be seen as having sufficient status for high society. While Pocahontas was apparently treated well in London, not everyone was so impressed. Historians now suggest that the public regarded her with fascination rather than great respect.

Pocahontas and Rolfe lived in Middlesex for a while and then at Rolfe's family home in Norfolk. In early 1617, Smith met the couple at a social gathering and wrote that, when Pocahontas saw him, "without any words, she turned about, obscured her face, as not seeming well contented", and was left alone for two or three hours. Later, they spoke more; Smith's record of what she said to him is fragmentary and enigmatic. She reminded him of the "courtesies she had done", saying, "you did promise Powhatan what was yours would be his, and he the like to you". She then discomfited him by calling him "father", explaining that Smith had called Powhatan "father" when he was a stranger in Virginia, "and by the same reason so must I do you". Smith did not accept this form of address because, he wrote, Pocahontas outranked him as "a King's daughter". Pocahontas dismissed this with “a well-set countenance".

In March 1617, Rolfe and Pocahontas boarded a ship to return to Virginia, but they sailed only as far as Gravesend on the river Thames when Pocahontas became gravely ill.  She was taken ashore and died at the approximate age of 21 of unknown illness. According to Rolfe, her last words were: "all must die, but tis enough that her child liveth".

In 1907, Pocahontas was the first Native American to be honoured on a US stamp. In July 2015, descendants of her tribe became the first federally recognized tribe.  

“You think you own whatever land you land on/The earth is just a dead thing you can claim…You think the only people who are people are the people who look and think like you.’

 

The way that Pocahontas has been remembered in popular culture is almost more interesting and revealing than her actual story itself. After her death, increasingly fanciful and romanticized representations were produced about Pocahontas, in which she and Smith are frequently portrayed as romantically involved – for which there is no contemporary evidence. Pocahontas has been an enduring image figure in popular culture, the prototypical “Indian princess,” whose narrative has been consistently manipulated to suit the polemical, literary, or financial needs of its interpreters. From the early 19th century, the emphasis of her story shifted from her saving Smith’s life and her work with the colonists, to Pocahontas’s relationship with Rolfe – a mixed-race marriage which provided a practical and symbolic model for blending indigenous and colonial culture.

By the time of John Gadsby Chapman’s painting of The Baptism of Pocahontas, the narrative focussed on her assimilationist acceptance of Christianity. In the journey from Simon van de Passe’s 1616 engraving from life to her depiction in Chapman’s painting, Pocahontas’s features and skin tone were dramatically altered to more closely resemble Euro-American standards of female beauty. Eventually, Smith’s dubious description of his rescue was increasingly accepted as history, and fictional portrayals such as those by Disney instead focussed on her relationship with Smith rather than Rolfe. In the run-up to the American Civil War, abolitionists claimed Pocahontas as a symbol of the possibility of racial harmony, while Southerners pointed to her and Rolfe as progenitors of Southern aristocracy who offered an alternative national foundation myth to the Northern version centred on the Pilgrims. Thus, Pocahontas is also symbolic of the way that women – especially women of colour – are used as props to support political or popular rhetoric, their stories, bodies, and relationships open to manipulation that best serves the white agenda.

While I love Disney’s Pocahontas as much as anyone (beautiful aesthetics and some real inspirational songs/quotes), I would rather she be remembered for her true story – she was an intermediary in the wars of men and brokering peace for several years;  she was outspoken against being used as a pawn in the games of both her native and colonial men; she took people as she found them regardless of their nationality or ethnicity; bravely saved many lives of the people who sought to take her land from her; chose an interracial marriage in a time when this was greatly frowned upon; moved to the other side of the world leaving everything she knew behind; and lived an incredibly important and meaningful life before her tragically young death.