POCAHONTAS ON THE DELAWARE: The Intersection of History and Legend in the Historiography of New Jersey (original) (raw)
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Letras Escreve, 2020
Western History and Literature have been perpetuating the image of women who have played an important role in the creation of the nation. According to those narratives, they emerge as figures that have helped European men to understand, connect and be part of native culture.Most importantly, they abandoned their own culture in order to build a more “civilized” nation in alliance with the Europeans and therefore they are seen as traitors. However, more recent studies tell us different stories about those women, stories that reveal that, in fact, these women were subjugated and/or discredited. From this perspective, this article aims at reflecting upon the oppressive patriarchal colonial forces that build the narrative of native people as the other. In that intent, we will analyze the poem “Pocahontas to Her English Husband, John Rolfe,” as well as the biography of Pocahontas, both written by Paula Gunn Allen, a native American writer, who gives voice to the silenced native woman and ...
Saving Pocahontas: a Conversation on Gender, Culture, and Power in the Storied Saving Moment
2019
Pocahontas is a figure with much cultural capital, even today, and her influence was historically important to Native and European agendas alike. Pocahontas as a person indeed had a life that seemed to influence political relations between Native and European (specifically Powhatan, specifically English). However, the storied construct of Pocahontas has had significantly more cultural sway, influencing (or at least representing changes in) everything from gendered power dynamics to the interplay between the European Colonizer and the Indigenous Other.1 Pocahontas’ image has been re-appropriated over and over throughout time to further political agendas and to represent the female and the Other. To this end, Pocahontas has been variously represented as the innocent, the “little wanton” rebel, the oppressed Native woman, the erotic exotic, the empowered political powerhouse and combinations of all of these archetypes. To focus this project, I will analyze four plays in the first half ...
Review of Gunlög Fur's A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters among the Delaware Indians
Author eBooks, 2011
Gunlög Fur's A Nation of Women is an ambitious book. It is essentially an overview of Delaware history and cultural change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from a gender studies perspective. During this time, the Delaware were commonly referred to as women in diplomatic contexts, and Fur's book attempts to unpack the meanings behind this designation, first by examining the "roles and responsibilities of women" among the Delaware, and the "historical conditions that made such a gendered designation possible." She examines gender both as an "organizing principle for subsistence activities, division of labor and exchange, and dispersion of power" as well as "a process of thought and belief" that "finds sanction in the spiritual realm" (2-3).
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2002
What do we know about Pocahontas? We know that she was Powhatan's daughter, and in 1609 he was the principal leader of his people; and that Powhatan's two brothers and a sister, her uncles and aunt, were the leaders in three of the towns nearby, and that when Powhatan died, his brothers, not his children, governed in his place. We will never know if, like Powhatan's sister, Pocahontas would one day have ruled a town and become a powerful leader among her people because, as a teenager, she was kidnapped by the British, converted to Christianity, married to John Rolfe, taken to England where she died at the age of twenty-one, and was buried in St. George's Church in Gravesend. The British called her princess, but that is because the British thought Powhatan, because he was the principal leader in his country, must be a king. They didn't speak enough of the local Algonquian language to pick up on the subtleties of the political system of the indigenous people they met, and so they guessed at things and what they saw was shaped by their own cultural expectations of "pagan" society. Reading the documents the colonizers wrote is a revelation of what prejudices they held. The stereotypes are that old, and they grow. We know that the colonists were shocked that the people around Chesapeake Bay wore little clothing, and, in particular, they thought the women wanton. Three different historians tell us that the British translated the name Pocahontas to mean "little wanton," and they all comment on how most Powhatan women had naked breasts and that before puberty young girls went naked. They give Pocahontas's real name as Mataoka, and none tells us what it means. In his early writings from the period, John Smith mentions that Pocahontas brought food to trade for English goods, and that her generosity saved the colonizers from starvation. But not until 1624, after she was dead, did he write the Generall Historie of Virginia in which he talked about how she saved his life. Before she died, no one told that story, and after Smith wrote of it only two of that first group of colonists, neither of whom were present at the place where
Pocahontas and Ignou Ouaconisen: Profitable Native Princesses
Benjamin Balak and Charlotte Trinquet du Lys (ed.), Creation, Re-creation, and Entertainment: Early Modernity and Postmodernity. Tubingen: Biblio 17, 2019, 351-369., 2019
The eastward crossing of the Atlantic by Native Americans during the early modern period remains an understudied topic in the history of European imperialism. This overlooked phenomenon is all the more surprising since “these Americans were the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ most persistent and accessible wonders .” Besides becoming “instant celebrities” who attracted huge crowds, these exotic visitors facilitated peace alliances and contributed to capturing investors’ interests in Northern American settlements . Furthermore, the meticulous staging of their visit by European governments served to showcase successful colonial policies. Depending on how well they served expansionist goals, these visiting Indians were celebrated and remembered very differently. In this article, I compare the contrasting legacies of two Native American princesses who sojourned in Europe at that time: the Powhatan princess Pocahontas, who stayed in London in 1616, and the Missouri princess, Ignou Ouaconisen, who visited Paris in 1725. Despite many similarities between their stories and purpose of their European sojourns, these two Native American princesses diversely impacted the collective imagination. Since the 17th-century, the legend of Pocahontas has largely been used to legitimize British imperialism and, later, to ease American white supremacist consciousness. I argue that the seemingly innocent Disney direct-to-video sequel, Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World (1998), participates in this tradition and communicates a dangerously simplified representation of “otherness,” conveying a message of English culture’s superiority. However, the factual and fictional documents accounting for the visit of Ignou Ouaconisen reveal a more complex relationship between 18th-century French and Native Americans. In this article, I contend that the comparison between a 20th-century American fairytale on film and an 18th-century French chronicle – through different means of relating historical facts – uncovers enduring stereotypical representations of Native American women and imperialistic (colonial and postcolonial) issues at stake.
The Essentialization of Pocahontas
2017
The story of European colonization in North America looms large in modern American cultural legend and imagination. The image of the pilgrims on the Mayflower, the first Thanksgiving, and the Jamestown colony are important parts of American foundation mythology. The story of Pocahontas is among those national legends, its retelling an integral part of a canon which seeks to tell the early story of the relationship between the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Europeans who would colonize their lands. Like most national histories, kernels of truth intermingle with legend to create a mythological and idealized past. In this, portrayals of the life of Pocahontas have shifted over time, but throughout have essentialized her and her people, presenting more often the values of the writer and artist, than the woman they claim to represent.