Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma

Townsend begins her book by imagining Pocahontas’s first view of Plymouth: “As it turned out, England was gray” (ix).

John Smith, a settler at Jamestown, disseminated the story that Pocahontas flung herself on him to save him from execution at the hands of her father, the Algonkian chief Powhatan. In fact, the English kidnapped Pocahontas and held her hostage as collateral in a dispute over tribute payments of corn. Pocahontas brought the standoff to an end when she converted to Christianity and married a colonist called John Rolfe. She traveled to England in the hopes of learning information that might help her people.

The popular story of Pocahontas as a woman who came to love the colonizers and their culture, Townsend argues, is a comforting fable to satisfy an American need to believe that the indigenous people of the Americas respected white settlers and believed in their cultural superiority. This lie, Townsend says, does neither the indigenous tribes nor Pocahontas justice. Pocahontas stands as both a notable figure and a symbolic one: “When we consider the real events of Pocahontas’s life, we learn more not only about another human being but about our own past, and ourselves” (xi).