Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma

Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (2004) is a history of Pocahontas’s role in the early stages of English colonialism in the Americas. Its author, Camilla Townsend, is a Professor of History at Rutgers University who has earned multiple awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, for her work. This guide refers to the 2005 Hill and Wang paperback edition.

In Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, Townsend reconstructs a biography of Pocahontas, a figure so wrapped up in legends that she’s hard to see for the person she really was. Townsend deconstructs the racist myth of the virtuous Indian damsel who fell in love with white men (and white culture), instead painting a picture of a brave and complex person whose own words and impressions have mostly been lost to history.

Townsend contextualizes Pocahontas’s story with an overview of English colonialism in the New World territory they called Virginia. During this complicated, uncertain period of history, the English and the native Algonkian tribes tried to work out a relationship with each other, sometimes through diplomacy and sometimes through war.

Powhatan, Pocahontas’s father, was a powerful chief who had united many once-warring tribes through a mixture of warfare, strategic marriages, and political savvy. His people were farmers who retained hunter-gatherer skills and had an elaborate cultural and ritual life, full of music and beautiful clothing. Pocahontas was the daughter of one of Powhatan’s less politically important wives; power in this culture passed matrilineally, and Powhatan made marriages as a way of bringing recalcitrant tribes into kinship bonds. In spite of her relatively low status, Pocahontas was a favorite: Pocahontas, in fact an affectionate childhood nickname, means something like “Mischief” or “Little Playful One.”

The people of Powhatan’s region had a number of encounters with European colonists when the English began making inroads, and they had good reason to mistrust the colonists. At this stage, English colonists relied on the good will of the Indians around them for food and established trading relationships with the local tribes, but violence and mistrust often marred those relationships. The infamous John Smith, a pugnacious early settler, exemplifies the complexity of the relationships between colonists and natives. Powhatan took a shine to Smith and adopted him as an honorary son, but Smith also led many violent assaults against Indian villages. Smith’s spurious story about Pocahontas rushing in to rescue him from a ritual execution is a major piece of the Pocahontas myth to this day.

In a time of unrest between the colonists and the natives, disgruntled members of an outlying tribe conspired with the English to take Pocahontas hostage. Only in her teens, she took her captivity as an opportunity to work as a diplomat, gathering information and learning as much as she could about the English.

While in captivity, she agreed to marry the Englishman John Rolfe. Townsend is keen to emphasize the complexity of this marriage: It appears to have been both a truly affectionate and mutual relationship and one complicated by culture clashes. Rolfe wrote a long letter to his patron, Sir Thomas Dale, expressing both his passionate love for Pocahontas and his fears and doubts about the differences between them. Townsend points out that it was not the absence of doubts but the ability of both parties to see past them that allowed the marriage to be successful—as, by all extant accounts, it was.

Pocahontas traveled to England, where she became something of a celebrity, though not treated with much respect. Townsend examines the portrait that was made of her while she was in London, and her one recorded direct statement (an expression of frustration and anger at John Smith, whom she accused of having abandoned his kinship to Powhatan) to get a sense of the woman behind the myth. Pocahontas and the Indians who traveled with her saw no chance for peaceful cohabitation with the English in Virginia. The colonists’ force was too great and their numbers too many.

Pocahontas didn’t live to deliver the news of what she’d seen to her family in Virginia. She died in England, likely of pneumonia, and was buried there. Often mythologized as a paragon of virtue who might have singlehandedly saved her people through her good example—or, conversely, as a tragic and helpless victim—Pocahontas was more likely a brave and passionate person doing her best for her people.