Pocahontas And The Powhatan Dilemma Essay

In the book “Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma” the author is trying to give people a more realistic and factual based outlook on the actual story of Pocahontas. The author’s book is very different from all the other biographies of Pocahontas. It shows us, as the readers, how much the seventeenth-century Native Americans were alike. In the film Pocahontas that was created by Disney it is said that many of the English were trying to enhance the lives of many of the savages. The movie leaves us with the feeling and impression that the New World English settlers were here just to educate and Christianize the Native Americans. However, in this book, it is very evident that this is not the truth. Through the perception that Townsend show her readers

of the life of Pocahontas it is clear that the English settlers intent for colonial America was not actually based on good will, but rather remorseless and avaricious cruelty. It could be said that Camilla Townsend strives to portray the life of Pocahontas in a way that she herself may have described it.

This book goes above and beyond to separate the facts from mythology in regards to Pocahontas’s life and provides us with information on the cultural context and in which she was raised. The book tries to recapture and show us the humanity of Pocahontas. While reading the book we learn a lot about the unknown truth behind America’s beloved story and of course we learn about the Native American girl Pocahontas. Camilla argues what she believes happened and what facts she has to prove what she believes. Since we were kid’s proponents of American exceptionalism, romantic poets, and Hollywood moguls have continued to change reality to the point that it is said that the real Pocahontas no longer exists. It shows us that she went against what people actually thought of women during that time and became her own person. According to the book, “she was as brave as all her people--not a simple, joyful worshipper of English men or power, but a real and complicated woman with her own plans, goals, and ideas” (p. xi). This book goes against anything we have ever been told and lead to believe and makes us see the story in a new

way. Camilla Townsend definitely got her point across in this book.
It is very obvious that Camilla is firmly biased towards the Powhatan people. Camilla describes the Indians in such a way that makes them seem far more superior then the colonist, sophisticated and intelligent. “Without question, they knew about and actively discussed the Europeans’ advantages. At present the strangers were few in number, constantly bickering, unable to feed themselves. What the Indians most clearly needed to know was exactly how great the technological advantages ultimately were. In all their interactions with the newcomers, the Indians sought information; what they gleaned must surely have been the subject of debate and conversation. Powhatan and his advisors spoke in council. The women working in the fields and in the village and at the riverside talked as they labored. Pocahontas, at age ten, heard all they had to say.” (p.65)
After showing us the already well-known fact, Camilla brings out the truth that has been completely rearranged over the course of four centuries. In the book she pays close attention to the social, cultural and political underpinnings of both the Virginia Algonquians and Englishmen close to colonization. As you read further on Camilla examines the first few months following the establishment of Jamestown and the enmity that shortly followed as well as Pocahontas’s imprisonment, kidnapping, marriage, conversion to Christianity, and finally her death. Camilla goes out of the way to show each of the situations from no one else’s perspective but Pocahontas’s. She demonstrates that, in each of these cases, Pocahontas managed English colonialism according to their own objectives and desires. Virginia Algonquians desired to establish their very own relationships with the colonizers on terms that benefited them. In Camilla’s words, “realpolitik not inherent egalitarianism” dictated the one-upmanship put in place by Pocahontas’s father both within his chiefdom and in his exchanges with the English (p.14).
Pocahontas’s “supposed rescue” of John Smith shows more of a ploy to get the Englishman’s loyalty than the manifestation of the sexual desire portrayed by Smith himself. Pocahontas’s alternation to Christianity and her marriage to John Rolfe show more of an attempt to form a familial and cultural bridge between the two cultures than the evident outcome of a situation where an Indian once exposed to the benefits of English culture immediately shows off her previous culture to rush headlong into the glories that were offered by Christianity and Anglicization. Camilla characterizes Pocahontas’s very fatal trip to England as a final attempt to not only further cement the kinship relationship between her and the English but also to obtain crucial intelligence about them. She wanted to deliver the things she learned to her father upon her return. Of course, as we all know, she did not return but the reports that were brought back by members of her group played a big role in convincing her father to retire and her uncle to pursue a much more militant policy in regard to the Virginians.
The cataclysmic results of that policy lead Camilla to a rather contradictory conclusion. She openly and harshly chastises those who consider an outcome other than the destruction and failure of the Powhatan Confederacy and the removal of almost all Indians from Virginia by the beginning of the eighteenth century as naïve. However, she celebrates the persistence of Algonquian people in Virginia today. She leaves us, as the readers, left wondering which of these outcomes we should believe.