In the book Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, Camilla Townsend rewrites the narrative of Pocahontas and the invasion of Europeans in the seventeenth century. Townsend challenges the myth of Pocahontas and her people—the colonial narrative, which paints the image of her as naive and innocent.Townsend instead shows the ways she was a diplomat aware of her material disadvantages in the face of the colonizing English.
The book starts with Pocahontas as a young child in Chesapeake, when she encounters John Smith (despite his account that she was of marriageable age). Negotiations and strategies are developed between the Native Americans and colonizers, as an intermarriage was considered to be a way to prevent war in the long term. The love that had been fabricated by John Smith's account is diminished into a falsehood and is shown to be a long-term strategy of Pocahontas and her father. She molds herself into a noblewoman visiting Jamestown and becomes an English gentlewoman in London during her marriage to John Rolfe. Townsend's writing provides more insight into the relationship between the conqueror and conquered. It explores the complexities of white immigration, turning the tables on contemporary narratives. As Pocahontas passes away, her husband refuses to recognize their child and continues to call her by her childhood name. John Rolfe's failure to see her as fully human and John Smith's fictional tale of lust symbolizes the nature of current colonialist views on Native Americans as inferior people to whites.
Set primarily in 17th century Virginia, this biographical history of the Native American princess Pocahontas (whose original name was Amonute) contextualizes her unique life within her family and community, while providing insights into their confrontation with the British colonists. Camilla Townsend emphasizes the social and political organization of the region, including the role of her father, King Powhatan, as it affected the British efforts to seize control. Locating the elite young woman’s role within the broader diplomatic efforts, Townsend reveals how the Algonquian Native peoples in the Chesapeake watershed area held off British incursions and, once they succumbed to military domination, negotiated for more favorable terms of co-existence. Re-evaluating the mythical scene of the girl’s rescue of John Smith, Townsend explains the diplomatic function of Algonquian efforts to symbolically incorporate the Europeans into their kinship system as a means of forging alliances.
Along with the historical situation, the author emphasizes the singularity of Pocahontas’s experience. Many Native Americans converted to Christianity and many elite Native women were married to, or became the mistresses of, white Europeans, and Pocahontas did both; relatively few relocated to Europe, however, while she moved with her husband, John Rolfe, to England, where she lived the rest of her life.
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In Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, Camilla Townsend offers a new and refreshing biography of Pocahontas, a woman who has been depicted in a variety of genres and a variety of media, but often with little accuracy; Townsend seeks to rectify that. She tells the story of Pocahontas chronologically and also explores her profound influence. Townsend describes how the life of Pocahontas epitomizes the struggle of Algonquian-speaking people of the Chesapeake against dispossession from their lands. However, she also serves as a liminal figure between two civilizations. Powhatan men and women occupied complementary gender roles, with neither gender's tasks being valued more highly than the others. Pocahontas was a Powhatan women but she also became an Englishwoman and her attire and mannerisms involve elements of both cultures. Townsend retells the story of Pocahontas from her point of view and not, as usual, from the point of view of John Smith, the Englishman rescued by her and adopted by the Powhatan people. Townsend's Pocahontas escapes the stereotypical post-colonial rendering: she is more than a wise Indian who 'saves' her people by adopting the 'superior' ways of the white colonizers. Townsend shows how Pocahontas sought the good of her people above all and how she served as an important figure of mediation between the Powhatan and the English. She corrects, too, many of the misconceptions about the relationship between Pocahontas and John Smith.
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