Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma

Pocahontas is a figure remembered almost entirely through other people’s impressions of her. Though she plays a huge role in both American and English colonial mythmaking, very little primary source material remains: no writings, very few reliable quotations. Townsend attempts to unearth her lived experience, filling in the person behind the myth.

Pocahontas was an intelligent, witty, and courageous woman. Daughter of the powerful Chief Powhatan, she was a favorite for her charm and energy (“Pocahontas,” a childhood nickname, means something like “Little Playful One”). When she became the victim of a political kidnapping—a conspiracy between the English settlers and her father’s enemies—she married the Englishman John Rolfe and attempted to use her access to England on behalf of her beleaguered people. Although often remembered as either a paragon or a victim, Pocahontas deserves to be remembered for her human complexity and her real bravery.

The powerful and savvy Powhatan, Pocahontas’s father, was the paramount chief of a huge kingdom who united many tribes under his leadership. The unprecedented scope of his rule made him an important figure during the early stages of English colonialism. A clever diplomat and seasoned fighter, he brought all his talents to bear in attempting to maintain his people’s sovereignty.

Pugnacious, arrogant, and prone to bending the truth for the sake of a good story, Smith was both influential and controversial in colonial Virginia. As one of the earliest settlers, he made a name for himself as both an adventurer and a chronicler. His story of his rescue from execution by the beautiful young Indian maiden Pocahontas—a story made up from whole cloth—took such a hold on the popular imagination that it’s still retold and embellished today. Smith, however, proved a less-than-reliable friend to Pocahontas and her people, as Pocahontas herself told him when she met him in England many years after their first acquaintance.