ABSTRACT
The Pocahontas narrative is a potent one for Americans, even today. The story of the young “Indian princess” who selflessly risked her own life to save Captain John Smith from execution and then married another Englishman, John Rolfe, to secure good relations between her people, the Powhatans, and the English, is known (to varying degrees of accuracy) by almost every American citizen. She has been called “America’s Joan of Arc because of her saintlike virtue and her courage to risk death for a noble cause” (Rasmussen and Tilton 7), and has been widely credited with “saving Jamestown from destruction and preserving the North American continent for future English colonization” (Abrams 3). 1 However, it was her marriage to John Rolfe—her rejection of her “pagan” past and acceptance of English religion, society, and culture—that, perhaps, is the most significant part of her legend, at least in terms of the colonial project. As the feminist scholar Annette Kolodny has noted, this marriage served “in some symbolic sense, as a kind of objective correlative for the possibility of Europeans actually possessing the charms inherent in the virgin continent” (5). It was an accepted and necessary union that allowed Anglo-Europeans to lay claim to Indianness as well as the cultural and geographical markers of Indianness; it was also the genesis of a uniquely “American” family tree. Americans reach back to Pocahontas, the ubiquitous “Indian grandmother” of America, to lay claim to an “authentic” autochthonous identity. 2 Author Frances Mossiker notes, “A long line of proud Virginians claims consanguinity or affinity with Pocahontas: Jeffersons, Lees, Randolphs, Marshalls, along with other lesser lights—to the number of two million, if the calculations of twentieth-century genealogists are accurate” (319). However, the trope of this acculturated Indian princess, who through her marriage to Anglo-America gives literal and figurative birth to a unique American identity, problematically reasserts the authority of an Anglo-colonialist identity at the expense and foreclosure of a Native one.
