|
|
|
Review
| Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, by Camilla Townsend. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. 240 pp., with illustrations. $25.00, cloth; $14.00, paper.
|
| The Algonkian Indian woman Pocahontas, as Camilla Townsend notes, is well known to Americans. Falsely mythologized as the youthful rescuer of Virginia adventurer John Smith from certain death at the hands of her father, Powhatan, and exoticized as the London touring companion and young wife of John Rolfe, the man credited with introducing West Indian tobacco into the Chesapeake, Pocahontas remains early colonial Virginia's most famous woman. Yet fame, Townsend argues, has obscured not just her history but also her identity and character. As a result, few Americans understand her as "a real and complicated woman with her own plans, goals, and ideas" (p. xi). And in this book, Townsend sets out to do exactly that; to uncover the details of Pocahontas's life and personhood and to place her story within the broader historical context of the interaction of Indian and English peoples in the earliest years of the Virginia colony. |
1
|
|
To accomplish her goal, Townsend devotes most of the early chapters of her work to synthesizing the considerable body of recent scholarship concerning the Native American communities of the Chesapeake, and English attitudes towards colonization. In doing so, she follows the lead of the scholars she cites in emphasizing the complexity and power of Powhatan's chiefdom, and the uncertainty and tensions embedded in England's colonial mission. Outcomes, she hints, were not inevitable. As the early colonists teetered on the brink of disaster, dependent in large measure on the benevolence of Powhatan and his people to provide them with much of the food they needed to survive, it was certainly not clear that they would "win." And, as she suggests to readers, it is precisely the tensions, conflicts, and uncertainties born of cultural misunderstandings between Indians and Europeans that make the Jamestown colony an especially interesting topic of study. |
2
|
|
Yet cultural misunderstandings also pave the way for Pocahontas's entry into Townsend's story. Although Pocahontas makes only relatively brief appearances in these first several chapters, Townsend nonetheless paints her as an important—albeit often reluctant and sometimes unknowing—cultural broker between her father and the English colonists. She is the curious ten-year old daughter of Powhatan who visits the colonists at the fort, at times acting as a translator, and at other times unknowingly tempting them with her nubile body. At the same time, she is not, as Townsend takes great pains to argue, the mythical heroine who rescued John Smith from certain death at her father's hands. |
3
|
|
As the work progresses, Pocahontas plays an increasingly central part in Townsend's reading of the sources. She describes, often in interesting detail, how Pocahontas's kidnapping and imprisonment by the colonists, her conversion to Christianity, her marriage to the young widower John Rolfe, and her fateful trip with Rolfe to London where she ultimately sickens and dies, symbolize the dramatic changes in her lifestyle, culture, and personal identity. In this regard, Pocahontas, as Townsend portrays her, is a tragic figure who likely suffered an intense sense of loneliness and isolation while living among the English. Yet, as Townsend also suggests, Pocahontas was never a powerless victim. Despite all outward appearances to the contrary, she remained at her core one of Powhatan's people; and her life choices, however circumscribed, were often intended to serve her people's needs, even if indirectly. |
4
|
|
In the end, teachers and students of early American history will find Townsend's engaging book useful on several levels. First, readers, especially undergraduate readers, will find here a complex and nuanced history of the Jamestown colony both from the perspective of the Native Americans who lived in the area and from the English who sought to remake it as their colony. Although this history offers relatively little new material, it nonetheless represents a readable synthesis of many recent and important works on early colonial Virginia. Second, readers will also find here an interesting, original, though far more speculative, history of the most famous woman to be associated with the Jamestown settlement. And in offering readers such analysis, however tentative some of it may be, Townsend has indeed moved us a long way towards demythologizing Pocahontas and recreating her as a real woman with her own hopes, fears, and frustrations. |
5
|
| | |
| Muhlenberg College |
Judith Ridner |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|