Paula Gunn Allen, Pocahontas to Her English Husband, John Rolfe (1988)

Pocahontas to Her English Husband, John Rolfe

Paula Gunn Allen

Well-known as a poet and writer of fiction, Paula Gunn Allen, of mixed European American and Native American Pueblo Laguna descent, was a professor of English and American Indian Studies at UCLA. In the following 1988 poem, the poet speaks in the imagined voice of Pocahontas.

In a way, then, Pocahontas was a kind of traitor to her people… . Perhaps I am being a little too hard on her. The crucial point, it seems to me, is to remember that Pocahontas was a hostage. Would she have converted freely to Christianity if she had not been in captivity? There is no easy answer to this question other than to note that once she was free to do what she wanted, she avoided her own people like the plague… .

Pocahontas was a white dream—a dream of cultural superiority.

—Charles Larson, American Indian Fiction

Had I not cradled you in my arms,

oh beloved perfidious one,

you would have died.

And how many times did I pluck you

5

from certain death in the wilderness—

my world through which you stumbled

as though blind?

Had I not set you tasks,

your masters far across the sea

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would have abandoned you—

did abandon you, as many times

they left you

to reap the harvest of their lies.

Still you survived, oh my fair husband,

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and brought them gold

wrung from a harvest I taught you

to plant. Tobacco.

It is not without irony that by this crop

your descendants die, for other

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powers than you know

take part in this as in all things.

And indeed I did rescue you—

not once but a thousand thousand times

and in my arms you slept, a foolish child,

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and under my protecting gaze you played,

chattering nonsense about a God

you had not wit to name. I’m sure

you wondered at my silence, saying I was

a simple wanton, a savage maid,

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dusky daughter of heathen sires

who cartwheeled naked through the muddy towns

learning the ways of grace only

by your firm guidance, through

your husbandly rule:

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no doubt, no doubt.

I spoke little, you said.

And you listened less,

but played with your gaudy dreams

and sent ponderous missives to the throne

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striving thereby to curry favor

with your king.

I saw you well. I

understood your ploys and still

protected you, going so far as to die

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in your keeping—a wasting,

putrefying Christian death—and you,

deceiver, whiteman, father of my son,

survived, reaping wealth greater

than any you had ever dreamed

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from what I taught you

and from the wasting of my bones.

(1988)