Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma

Camilla Townsend is an American historian and a professor of history at Rutgers University. She works on the early history of the Americas, with a special interest in indigenous peoples and European colonialism. Her writing has earned a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright grant, among other honors.

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.