Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma

The movement of history, Camilla Townsend argues, is driven not only by fact and action but also by imagination. Myths

“can lend meaning to our days, and they can inspire wonderful movies. They are also deadly to our understanding. They diminish the influence of facts, and a historical figure’s ability to make us think; they diminish our ability to see with fresh eyes” (x).

Pocahontas is notable for the power of her myths. The historical person has been almost consumed by the stories told about her, stories that reveal more about colonial ways of thinking than about her.

The myths of Pocahontas often reflect white male colonists’ anxieties and secret desires. In John Smith’s narrative, for instance, Pocahontas is presented, not as the relatively unimportant and uninfluential 10-year-old child, but as a nubile and pure-hearted babe, at once a “noble savage” and a desirable woman overcome by Smith’s own charms. Smith’s account exemplifies a frequent trend in colonial storytelling at the time and one that reflected a bigger metaphor underneath the machinery of colonialism: America itself as a fertile maiden awaiting the husbandly mastery of Europe.

The human habit of making individuals into symbols and myths means that the historian who wishes to get closer to reality needs to dig through both the myths of the past and the myths of the present.