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.