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
10
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,
15
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
20
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,
25
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,
30
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:
35
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
40
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
45
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
50
from what I taught you
and from the wasting of my bones.
(1988)