Camilla Townsend Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma Review

�White settlers wanted the Indians� land and had the forcefulness to take it; the Indians could not alive without their land.� This is the plainly truth that plays as an incessant drumbeat throughout Camilla Townsend�s book. Pocahontas, undoubtedly America�s most famous Indian woman, could do nothing to modify the fate of her people. One English chronicler put it baldly: �the vanquishing of the Indians is like to offering a more than ample and faire choice of fruitfull habitations, then hitherto our gentlenesse and faire comportment to the Savages could attaine to.�

Pocahontas was just a child when the raconteur and rakish Helm John Smith first encountered her. Later he wrote of her as though she had been a lovely maiden of marriageable historic period. Such accounts were rife in what was loosely chosen �history� � a cracking practiced yarn, then equally at present, sold better than the simple facts. Pocahontas was undoubtedly a very brilliant girl who was useful as a translator, and her father Powhatan often used her skills as an emissary to the wily whites. The Indians, by Townsend�s reckoning, were well enlightened that the whites were inimical to their interests and had plans to have their territories. It was but a question of how they should exist handled.

Both the natives and the immigrants tried various strategies. Colonizers were warned not to display the use of their weapons, because if the Indians saw how a musket worked, they would promptly steal it. Bargaining with the �salvages� every bit they were called, often yielded little more than a few cooking pots or sacks of nutrient, as the natives tried by whatever means to get the white man�s weapons.

Indians had their own ways of negotiating, ofttimes involving long, silent pauses considered to be a respectful consideration of what had just been said. They thought of intermarriage as a plus in the long game of besting 1�due south enemy. Inter-related families would not war with ane another. So the marriages of Pocahontas to her father�south enemies, and her trips to strange climes, were part of a long-standing strategy, and not necessarily a mark of any swell honey on her office. Indeed, as John Rolfe�s married woman she was a virtual prisoner, forced to article of clothing uncomfortable clothing and swallow unusual foods likewise as to run his household, work his land, all the while coping with a 2nd language.

However, information technology seems apparent from historical evidence that Pocahontas would have enjoyed her adventures, blest with a natural intelligence and marvel that immune her to delve deeply into the foreigner�south civilization, even including an credible religious conversion. Camilla Townsend, author and associate professor of History at Colgate University, has written this book in role to dispel the mythology well-nigh Pocahontas and her people, and to effort to give united states a realistic understanding of the dynamics betwixt the conquerors and the conquered. She draws from a large diverseness of sources to illustrate her signal � that the Indians were more savvy than they are generally given credit for, and yet with all their cunning and their own advanced degree of civilization, there was no manner to stem the tide of white clearing or concord on to the wealth of forest and beast they allowable before the incursion of the Europeans.

The sad fiction of Pocahontas�s connexion to the English language seems painfully clear in the reaction of her married man John Rolfe to her death, possibly of pneumonia, at an inn in England. He left their son behind and never saw him once more, sailing on the side by side tide back to the colonies. Equally Pocahontas had said to him, not long before her demise, �Your countriemen will lie much.� Up to the end he called her by her childhood name, and she knew the truth of that � whatever his feelings for her, he would ever see her and her people as children, junior to himself.

© 2004 by Barbara Bamberger Scott for curledup.com.

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Source: https://www.curledup.com/pocapowh.htm

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