12/8/2022 0 Comments Real pocahontas story![]() ![]() The “Indian Princess” can’t speak for herself now, so we should be wary of what is said in her name. Pocahontas the person has long since disappeared into what Bell calls the “colonized body, filled with other voices and purposes,” a screen for projecting fantasies of America’s founding by Europeans. And he evidently liked the idea of being rescued by “ladies of high rank” so much he claimed it happened to him on three different occasions. He hadn’t mentioned the incident in an earlier account of his time among the Powhatan. Did it even happen? If it did, was Smith misinterpreting it? Smith, after all, didn’t tell this pivotal piece of the Pocahontas legend until 1624, years after Pocahontas was dead. Bell writes that she entered “history as the sexual objectification of Native defeat and colonial conquest,” continuing, “the body of Pocahontas and the body of America are the same contested site in the colonial enterprise.”Įven, as Gail Tremblay notes, the most famous incident in the myth of Pocahontas-her rescue of the soldier-of-fortune John Smith from certain death-is questionable. She was called “Little Wanton” by Europeans shocked by her nakedness Native children only wore clothes in winter. Pocahontas is a metaphor “for the author’s position on the colonial project.” Ten or eleven when she first met Europeans, Pocahontas is almost always presented as an adolescent in these encounters. “Pocahontas” was actually only her nickname she was formally named Matoaka.īell points out how many of the accounts of Pocahontas reveal more about the authors than their subject. ![]() Betty Louise Bell gives a synopsis of what little is known about Pocahontas, “her powerful father’s favored child, a tribal ambassador to the Jamestown settlement, the mediator between British colonists and indigenous peoples, the first Native woman to convert to Christianity, the third Virginian Native woman to marry a colonist, the mother of a new mixed blood race, and the first Native American to be honored by the Court of King James.” Pocahontas left no testimony of her own. The most famous incident in the myth of Pocahontas-her rescue of the soldier-of-fortune John Smith from certain death-is questionable.Įver since, Pocahontas has been romanticized and mythologized in more advertisements, as well as books, plays, poems, movies, cartoons, and dolls.
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