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“Stereotype was originally used in a procedure in typography involving printing plates which made it possible to obtain a printing surface that could be used thousands of times without having to be replaced. Gradually the adjective “stereotyped” came to mean mechanically repeated or reproduced without variation. A stereotype conforms to a fixed or general pattern and lacks individual distinguishing marks or qualities, and it is ‘simple rather than complex or differentiated.'” (Sundquist 1987:19).
From the time she first appeared on the pages of Englishmen’s diaries, cavorting with young boys and cartwheeling nude down the settlement streets, Pocahontas has been called the mother of the nation, the daughter of a savage king, and a whore. The reality behind the image has been difficult to grasp, if it can be at all.
What we know about her, and her people, is from these Englishmen, and is the foundation of the Indian stereotype— the mindset Ron Therriault of Salish Kootenai College calls a “state of mind [that] all blacks can dance, all Mexicans are lazy and all Indians are savage.”
Pocahontas and her tribe left no personal record to challenge this image.
In life, and in print, she was stripped of her personal identity, and became little more than a character whose image is constantly manipulated by Western society to reflect itself and to suit its needs.
Most Americans learn about her in grade school, around Thanksgiving, when children make construction paper headdresses. She was the ravishing heroine who risks her own life to save the love of her life, Captain John Smith, from her father’s sentence of death.
It is a story that blends into the other Indian images from early colonization: Squanto, the friendly Indian, who lived with the Pilgrims and taught them how to survive the harsh New England climate, and Sacajawea, the women who led Lewis and Clark through the Western frontier.
Pocahontas is the first Native woman we follow from childhood to adulthood. We see her change from the child Indian “princess,”1 daughter of Powhattan, “king” of the Virginian tribes, into a Westernized Christian woman.
In general, women in Western literature appear in prescripted roles. They act as the temptress, the angel or savior figure, or as a mother figure, either good or bad. These categories are also applied to American Indian characters.
Her female attributes tend to be her positive side, and her indigenous culture her negative. For instance, the English of the seventeenth century and many today, saw her mothering of the Virginia Colony through the gifts of corn as positive, and her nudity and playfulness with the opposite sex as deviant.
This duality is reinforced by her virginal qualities. Unlike Sacajawea who was married and burdened with a newborn child during her travels with Lewis and Clark, Pocahontas reigns as an “Angel,” a savior figure of the New World.
But most important in the creation of the Pocahontas stereotype is what has not been written about her. None of the early writers, including Smith, call her a traitor to her people and the indigenous population as a whole. Instead, her deeds were exalted because the people who wrote about them were the ones who benefited from her actions the most.
Though the story has been embellished over the past four hundred years, the Pocahontas of historical record does have the essence of drama. The Virginia Company landed on April 26,1607— the first settlement after Sir Walter Raleigh’s failed attempt with the Roanoke colony in the late sixteenth century. The mission’s goal was simple: collect the riches of the land (assorted precious metals, gold, etc.) and ship the goods home for profit. As for the “naturals” already living there, the company merely said not to agitate them.
Pocahontas appears first as the self-confident messenger on behalf of her father. The foreign presence of the English was disconcerting to her people, but not entirely unknown—stories of explorers along the coast had certainly reached the Powhattan Indians. There was also a belief that the pale English were ancestral dead returned from the grave for revenge—a notion Columbus also encountered about 150 years earlier.
Pocahontas’ main interaction with the English began in 1609 (according to Smith’s writings), when Pocahontas rescued the captain from execution. As Smith writes in The General Historie:
A long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many as could layd hands on him, dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs, to beate out his brines, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no in treaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death.”
Powhattan spared Smith—either out of mercy or as part of an adoption ceremony to make Smith beholden to him. It appears Smith was expected to make Pocahontas trinkets—which, of course, he did not.
Though many have conjectured that Smith loved Pocahontas, and vice versa, it seems unlikely. She would have been about eleven years old—too young for romantic love. Instead, she seems to have pestered him without mercy. Smith reports that Pocahontas led him to a rendezvous with Powhattan, which turned out to be a surprise show by her in “a fayre payre of Bucks homes on her head” and about 30 scantily dressed girls of “most excellent ill varietie.”
At the end, Smith writes “…all those Nymphes more tormented him than ever, with crowding, presing and hanging about him, most tediously crying, love you not me? Love you not me?”2
But Pocahontas does remain a savior in Smith’s writings. She later warns Smith of her father’s surprise attack, and harbors a Virginian meant to meet Smith later that night.
Pocahontas remained with the Patawomekes as well, abandoning her people and apparent husband, Kacoum. Though she believed she was safe among this new tribe, she was taken prisoner by Captain Argall to the Jamestown settlement in 1612.
During her imprisonment, she learned to write, speak and read English fluently and was baptized a Christian with a new name, Rebecca. John Rolfe,5 the first Englishman to cultivate tobacco in the Colonies seems to have been honestly smitten by the princess, writing he was “in love.” His friend Captain Ralph Hamor wrote “Long before this time, a gentleman of approved behavior and honest carriage, maister John Rolfe had been in love with Pocahuntas and she with him.”
They married in 1615, and had a son, Thomas, about a year later. After a fruitful tobacco harvest, the young Rolfe family ventured to England. After a year’s sabbatical, they boarded ship to return home to Jamestown in 1617, but she died, apparently of tuberculosis, before leaving the country, and was buried in Gravesend, England. Her burial site is now a minor tourist attraction.
In London and in the Colonies, Pocahontas’ life was romanticized. Pocahontas became a cult figure of the social world. Unlike the other “savages” that visited the London since the fifteenth century, Pocahontas was the first woman of “high breeding”—a princess—from the savage world.
She was visited by contemporary figures such as Ben Johnson and Sir Walter Raleigh, and entertained by the Royal family itself. Most important, she served as a living advertisement to potential investors in the Virginia Company—a testament to their claim that the Natives of the red land were friendly, and readily yielded to the authority of Western culture and religion.6
The exotic sound of her name and social rank lent itself easily to advertising— there were a number of whimsical portraits of her drawn, some in Continental Europe, for public bars hoping to capitalize on her name. These are rather odd looking images of Pocahontas; she looks Caucasian with dark skin.
Pocahontas sat for only one known portrait, painted by Simon van de Passe in 1616. The painting, reproduced in an engraving in 1793, was used for advertising by the Virginia Company—her high neck ruff is believed to have covered the decorative tattooing common among Tidewater7 peoples. She holds an ostrich plume, to signify royalty, and a white beaver hat. The image of Pocahontas is rather masculine, and she looks unnatural in European clothing. In terms of Western taste, she is rather plain—which is augmented by the heavy make-up added by the artist. The de Passe painting was copied by numerous artists, who “softened” her indigenous looks and changed various aspects of her costume.
Other artists were interested in depicting her in action—namely those daring feats on behalf of the English. A 1632 print shows her saving Captain John Smith from execution, along with scenes from the expedition. There, she is seen from the back and in the nude, throwing her arm awkwardly over Smith to shield him from the executioner’s stone.
By the eighteenth century, Pocahontas’ image became more Caucasian, and her story more mythical. Most artists, especially those from Europe, had little contact with indigenous groups firsthand—most Native people had died in battle or from disease within the first years of colonization. Others fled, or were forcibly removed, from the East Coast. These artists were attracted to the pastoral elements of Pocahontas, and her relationship to the Noble Savage ideal, rather than her Native roots.
The first history texts, namely Robert Beverley’s History and Present State of Virginia, spoke of her virtue, and according to an advertisement for the book in the Boston Gazette in 1734, “greatness of Mind.” Through such literature, she became an object of inspiration for artists—even child artists. Mary Woodbury, an eighteenth century school girl, painted an especially fine portrait of the heroine.
Of course Woodbury drew from her own experience. Pocahontas—the ideal of “Female Character”—is a Caucasian women in eighteenth century dress, holding aloft a rose, the symbol of virtue, with the compulsory flowers in her hair. But Woodbury’s vision was not simply childish naiveté—it represents the image that all artists had of Pocahontas, and the “good” Indian in general. She was the template of how all good Natives should look and act.
Pocahontas’ story and image took on biblical overtones in the South during the nineteenth century, with her transformation from a “Native” to a European, likened to the rebirth of a sinner into a Christian. In John Gadsby Chapman’s Baptism of Pocahontas at Jamestown, Virginia, 1613, she is portrayed in the act of supplication before the preacher—who resembles European images of Christ— performing the service. Her dress is painted a glowing white, and her hair is braided to resemble a crown.
In this painting, the Indians are either looking away from the scene, or staring with an expression of fear on their faces. Also noticeable is the position of the indigenous people. They are virtually untouched by the light of the foreground, unlike most colonists in the painting.
At least one artist, Robert Matthew Sully, became obsessed with the image of Pocahontas and her legend. His first rendition of Pocahontas in 1842, known as the “Turkey Island portrait”, was a reproduction of a deteriorated painting given to him by his uncle. He hoped the flowing hair and robe would give her a less rigid appearance than shown in other portraits.
Though some descendants appreciated the effort, others were outraged. In Pocahontas: Her Life and Legend, William Boiling, a descendant of Pocahontas, is reported to have said the portrait “represented a large, fat, sallow [person with] a dead white skin, enormously large breasts much exposed, brown curly hair with blue Eyes…. Let’s hang [it] up … in a public room in Richmond and let the people judge for themselves.”
The descendants of Pocahontas and Rolfe had prospered in antebellum Virginia, and had intermarried with the South’s most powerful and elite families. 8 Ironically, these families were proud of their mixed heritage—while at the same time slave-owners.
To show Pocahontas scantily clad, with stringy hair, rotund body and dark skin, was equal to painting a portrait of Christ in much the same manner. Her descendants envisioned her as the personification of beauty and grace, the virgin princess, not a human being—especially not one with a weight problem.
Despite the criticism, Sully continued his love affair with Pocahontas, painting her in various poses, shades of pigment, and adornments. In Pocahontas (1850s), he paints her in royal robes and a crown. His Pocahontas (1852-1855) was an attempt to place her in the pastoral environment where she looked much like a British milkmaid with flowers in her hair. It is not ironic that this received kudos from the Virginia Historical Society whose members at that time venerated the Caucasian renditions of Pocahontas.
But by the 1800s, the importance of the Virginia Company began to fade from the nation’s memory. The first history books primarily were written and published in the North, and tended to laud the heroic feats of the Plymouth Rock settlers, reducing Virginia to a mere footnote. The religious mission of the middling or middle class Plymouth Rock settlers was considered loftier than the evil mercantilist venture of the reprobate Virginia Company. This is not true—the Virginia Company charter clearly stated its purpose to “propagat[e] Christian Religion to such people as yet live in darkness.” Church attendance twice-a-day was required, and at one time, a missed service was punishable by death. But this zeal was forgotten by those exalting Puritan idealism.
The biased vision of history left many people in the United States believing Plymouth Rock was the first settlement— with Pocahontas blending into Squanto, and later Sacajawea. By the early 1900s, one confused playwright, Edwin O. Ropp, included Hiawatha, Minnehaha and Geronimo in his play Pocahontas—without irony or humor intended. By the turn of the century, Pocahontas lost not only her indigenous identity, but her individuality.
During the late nineteenth century, Pocahontas became a symbol of the civil strife between the states. Scholars from the North attacked the validity of the Pocahontas-saving-Smith story. The most famous of these did not concern Pocahontas as much as re-kindle an historical political rivalry. Henry Adams— great-grandson of John Adams—in 1867 wrote a scathing article about Smith, calling him a liar. This was later refuted by William Wirt Henry, grandson of Virginian Patrick Henry.9
This was also a time when artists and writers alike began to make fun of her story, not only in the North, but throughout the United States. In 1886, Welland Hendrick produced his play about the heroine, featuring songs with lyrics like “Now you see it is no myth/ Pocahontas saved John Smith/ the brave raised his ax-oh! / She kept off the whacks-oh,”—all performed by Smith’s minion, a man in blackface.
During the Civil War, Pocahontas played a duel role. She was used to both denounce and uphold slavery. Abolitionists saw her as a symbol of the mixed-blood heritage that many Virginians extolled, while hypocritically upholding slavery. The South viewed Pocahontas, in her baptized “Rebecca” form, as their mother, and as a woman who recognized the superiority of European culture through her religious conversion. As one member of the Association of the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities said, according to Pocahontas: Her Life and Legend, Pocahontas rose “from the dominion of the savage to yield its wealth of soil and climate to that race which should dominate the world.”
The Civil War forever changed the world of the South and dampened the fame of Pocahontas. Few members of Congress had ever heard of Jamestown when Virginia requested funds for the 1907 tercentennial, for example.
As the twentieth century progressed, the South adopted an attitude of white male supremacy. Women who acted on their own were considered a threat to the set patriarchal system of the South, and the United States in general. Howard Chandler Christy’s Pocahontas caused an uproar of complaints in the South for showing an independent Indian woman10 with a Caucasian man kneeling at her feet to kiss her hand.
At the same time, disenfranchised separatists rallied around Jim Crow laws. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Anglo Saxon Clubs of America (founded in 1922) campaigned for legislation to outlaw miscegenation, and legalize harassment of non-Caucasian peoples—with the exception of the descendants of Pocahontas (or people with one-sixteenth Indian blood) who were considered white.
The image and story of Pocahontas has consistently been manipulated to reflect the era examining her, as in the Civil War, and perhaps even more in the twentieth century, when writers, artists and filmmakers alike began to capitalize on her image. In 1913, she was even featured in an early silent-motion picture.
Her literary life has also flourished. From the seventeenth to the twentieth century writers have been intrigued by her life and have tried to create a full personality from the sketchy historical record. The results were often less than inspired. In Garnett’s Pocahontas or The Nonpareil of Virginia, published in 1933, she is portrayed as an Indian maiden who feels an innate hatred and disgust toward her own people, “so innocent at heart that they knew no half-measures of feeling and behavior. They could be cruel, treacherous, savage and inhumanely bloodthirsty; but within a few hours of having barbarously slaughtered and mutilated his companions, they greeted people with song and laughter, with proffered fruits and gay glances.”
Though Garnett’s work is rather harsh toward the Native people of Virginia, it is typical of most work concerning Pocahontas at the time. There was little concern for the historical “truth” of the situation, for the romantic visions and the indictments of Native savagery were considered true. Indian people, according to Garnett, and all of dominant society, were barbaric and lascivious. One episode of Garnett’s book describes the ever-naked Pocahontas and her equally nude uncle, Opechancanough, in a semi-pornographic manner. “Whenever he saw his niece he called her to him by pet names and ran his strong, callused hand over her naked body, tickled her.”
She is saved by her love for Smith— who in this rendition promised to take Pocahontas with him to London, because, “every women belongs to a man someday, and I’ll be yours.”
The twentieth century artist is not fascinated by the meaning of her story or her symbolism of Virginia. Instead, there is a tendency to romanticize or lampoon her. Poet Carl Sandburg in his 1916 Cool Tombs calls to the Native princess’s spirit: “Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, …does she remember?” While Ogden Nash in 1939 poked fun at her life: “And her eyes went flash flash,/ And she said, Scat you po’ red trash,/ ….And she told him about her great-uncle Hiawatha and her cousin Sittin’ Bull and her kissin’ cousin King Philip, and don’t know who all.”
The epitome of the Pocahontas parody is John Barth’s 1960 The Sot-Weed Factor that purported to be the found diary of Captain John Smith that revealed he did sleep with Pocahontas.
Her shifting image has permeated every aspect of literature and art—even for children. The early twentieth century also offered romanticized visions of the Pocahontas-saving-Smith story—featuring a semi-eloquent Pocahontas and her idiotic relatives. Amazingly, the Natives all speak English—in a childish manner— even in the 1961 play, Pocahontas, by Aurand Harris.
Her effect on Indian people has been immense, but according to many Native scholars, she is only part of the problem. Ron Therriault, a native American studies instructor at Salish Kootenai College, notes that “We’re either larger than life, mythical, or something animal-like, savage. Once we become human… people want us to disappear.”
There have been revisionist efforts, namely Jean Fritz’s The Double Life of Pocahontas. But even this rendition leaves the young maiden larger than life. She lives between the Native and English worlds, eventually marrying John Rolfe—but this time with this inner knowledge that further Christianization efforts would fail and ruin the lives of all Native people.
While Fritz and other artists attempt to revise history, Walt Disney will offer another version of the story this summer with the release of Pocahontas, using the voices of Mel Gibson (Lethal Weapon) as Captain Smith; Russell Means (former American Indian Movement leader) as Powhattan and Irene Bedard (Lakota Woman) as Pocahontas.
The Disney company—and the Native actors involved—stress the movie’s cultural sensitivity. Russel Means, who has turned down “dozens” of movie offers—including the lead role in Geronimo—is adamant that this film : is the “finest movie ever made about Indians in Hollywood.”
He says this is the first film to show the mercantilistic motivations behind the British and European exploration and praised its depiction of an Indian woman “in a positive, wise role and as a matriarchal role model.” He points out that this film shows Indians in loving relationships as well, which is “rare in Hollywood”—and portrays the environment as a living, interconnected entity.
As he says, “The Lion King was for this generation as Bambi was for mine…showing animals are like human beings. [Pocahontas] shows that our culture in this instance was far superior— we understand animals and nature.”
But he admits that the “script wasn’t perfect at first—but every suggestion made was taken and dealt with [by Disney].”
James Fall, who portrays Pocahontas’ betrothed Indian love, Kacoum, concurs with Means, saying the film falls short of an accurate historical record, and that when he “originally heard of the project, [he] felt some trepidation.”
But, as he says, “Disney felt strongly about the use of native American actors in the roles….There’s going to be some flack of course…. It’s a hard line to walk. Indians are either shown too peaceful and innocent as in Dances with Wolves or as savage and violent.”
It is also a cartoon—in which Pocahontas sports a surprisingly sexy off-the-shoulder, buckskin mini-dress.
Educators such as Larry Aitken are not yet convinced its influence will be positive. Aitken, who has worked to lessen the impact Indian stereotypes, has less faith in Disney. He notes, “I took my grandchildren to the movies last week, and they showed an advertisement of Pocahontas, and I thought ‘here comes the stereotypes again.'”
But what is most important to remember when examining the ever changing image of Pocahontas is the virtual absence of any analysis or thought by Native peoples on the subject.
Therriault believes native Americans must set the record straight. “Tribal people have to accept total responsibility of who we are. If we allow Pocahontas to continue to be a symbol of our culture, this is no good, it’s dangerous,” he says.
Jennifer Gray Reddish is managing editor of Tribal College. She has conducted extensive research on the Nanticoke Indians of the Chesapeake Bay while completing her undergraduate degree at Washington College. This fall she will pursue graduate study in anthropology at the University of Chicago.
Notes:
1 The indigenous tribes did not have an Indian “royalty” comparable to that of England—though Powhattan does seem to have been a leader of a confederation of tribes throughout the Virginia area— many of which reside in the present-day regions, or close to their ancestral homelands today.
2 Smith always wrote about himself in third person, a common practice at the time.
3 He was not known by any last name.
4 From Smith’s writings. Spelman (also Spilman) later became an interpreter for the Patawomekes tribe. He wrote about his observations in Relation of Virginia. It is believed that Spelman was eventually killed by the Natives for unknown reasons.
5 Rolfe was a widower. His first wife died soon after childbirth in the Bermuda islands, where the ship on which they were travelling had crashed during a storm. Rolfe and the other survivors later made their way to Virginia. Pocahontas apparently believed he was the reincarnation of Smith. Rolfe insisted he loved, rather than lusted, Pocahontas—a conflict that plagued him. Rolfe feared that marrying Pocahontas was akin to sins of the Sonnes of Levie who had “taken strange wives of the people of the land”—in other words, miscegenation— which was actually against the law. It is believed that this (along with the fact that marrying Pocahontas—and thus making himself heir to a “kingdom”—might be seen as treachery) is one of the reasons why Smith did not take Pocahontas as his wife—though some people in the Colony had hoped he might marry her.
6 It is believed that Smith’s account of his rescue by Pocahontas was edited from his earlier accounts because the Virginia company feared it would lose investors if the “naturals” were portrayed as hostile.
7 This includes the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the small eastern tip of Virginia and the state of Delaware.
8 Thomas Rolfe, Pocahontas’ son, returned to Virginia as an adult, and married Jane Poythress. They had one daughter, Jane Rolfe, who married Col. Robert Boiling. Their grandson, Major John Boiling married the niece of the Commissary James Blair, D. D., founder of William and Mary College—originally begun to educate Native students.
9 Articles refuting and supporting Smith’s account of the Pocahontas rescue continue to this day. As late as 1992, J. A. Lemay published Did Pocahontas Really Save Captain John Smith (The University of Georgia Press) which surveyed all the existing literature on the subject. He offered his own conclusions on the matter—that Smith was telling the truth.
10 She is supposed to be Indian, even though Christy made his Pocahontas look decidedly Caucasian.
Bibliography:
Collings, Francis d’A. The Discovery of the Chesapeake Bay: An Account of the Explorations of Captain John Smith in the Year 1608. St. Michael’s, Maryland: Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, 1988.
Sundquist, Asebrit. Pocahontas Company: The Fictional American Indian Woman in Nineteenth- Century Literature: A Study of Method. New Jersey: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1987.
Garnett, David. Pocahontas or the Nonpareil of Virginia. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933.
Harris, Aurand. Pocahontas. Anchorage, Kentucky: The Children’s Theatre Press, 1961.
Mossiker, Frances. Pocahontas: The Life and the Legend. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. (Please note that this is a fine source concerning the literary history of Pocahontas, but Mossiker is woefully ethnocentric, referring to Native peoples as savages, redmen, braves and redskins.)
The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580- 1631) in Three Volumes. Ed. by Philip Barbour. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina press, 1986.
Leo, J. A. Did Pocahontas Really Save Captain John Smith? Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992.
Robertson, Wyndham (with R. A. Brock). Pocahontas (alias Matoaka) and Her Descendants. Richmond, Virginia: J. W. Randolph and English Publishers and Booksellers, 1887.
Rassmussen, William M. S. and Robert S. Tilton. Pocahontas: Her Life and Legend. Richmond: Virginia Historical Society, 1994. (This is the explanatory history of the images on display at their recent exhibition of Pocahontas paintings).
Fritz, Jean. The Double Life of Pocahontas. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1983.
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