Paula Gunn Allen, from Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat (2004)

from Pocahontas

Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat

Paula Gunn Allen

The following selection is excerpted from a 2004 biography of Pocahontas by Paula Gunn Allen (p. 321).

Fluidity of Identity

A part of the culture of individualism, a name is considered unchanging: it identifies one from cradle to grave; only one per customer is allowed. With many Native Nations, it was a different matter, and among many it still is. The figure frozen in history bears the child name: Pocahontas. It was her familiar or informal name, but it wasn’t meant to hang on as her identity; these people took (and take) a name to be indicative of one’s state—and childhood is a state. When Pocahontas became a woman—menstruating, pubic-haired, married—her name was no longer Pocahontas, although those of her close family who knew her best might still use the appellation affectionately. Even among modern Americans a child’s baby name is often used by the parents, siblings, grandparents, or aunts and uncles as a way of recalling familial ties, shared history, and affection.

It was as Pocahontas that John Smith knew her, and much of our knowledge about her comes from his quill. He ever referred to her as “Pocahuntis,” as he spelled the name, even years after her death, and Pocahontas she remained; only the spelling changed. That modern peoples know her only as a child says a great deal about white–American Indian relations, and it reveals volumes about Anglo-European consciousness. We read our culture and believe that we are reading about something other than ourselves; it is a common enough characteristic of a race that relies on early childhood learning for understanding everything that comes along for the rest of one’s life. The race I refer to here is neither Indian nor Anglo; it is human. The words Pocahontas, Powhatan, and Indians are familiar enough to many Americans. But the ideas and images they evoke differ greatly from community to community and from period to period. What Indian means to a person who is American Indian bears little resemblance to what it signifies in the minds of other Americans. Similarly, a narrative convention in one system often makes little sense in one that is at great variance from it. So the American Indian narrative tradition and the Indo-European one differ in a number of ways. This is a fact that certainly complicates understanding the one in the terms of the other.

That the difference is as basic as a name—name of person, place, or phenomenon—forces those intent on bridging the distance between one culture’s worldview and another’s to beware the easy categorization of either. Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat is first and last an Indian story, requiring that readers keep in mind that the bridge we must negotiate in considering Pocahontas’s life began in the Algonquin forests of the manitowinini. The story crosses over the sea from there, just as our hero, Matoaka, nicknamed Pocahontas and baptized Rebecca, went from manitowinini to Faerie, from tsenacommacah to England, and from child to legend.

Pocahontas, the child, is the persona who entered history when as a prepubescent girl she threw her arms around Smith and signaled that he would be adopted, or remade, into her clan. Her age at that time is reckoned at about eleven years. A few years later, she was abducted by the English and held at a rudimentary boarding school—the first of many devoted to the purpose of “civilizing Indians”—that was distant from James Fort, as the English version has it. However, from an Algonquin point of view, it is more likely that she went to them voluntarily, letting them believe whatever they would. She went as Matoaka (or Matoaks), which was her adult name. When she was adopted, was remade, to enter the Virginia Company clan, she traded her Indian name, Matoaka, for an English name, Rebecca. In Powhatan terms, in which remaking a person into another person was familiar, she was no longer Matoaka; she had become Lady Rebecca, and as Lady Rebecca she died. If we were to keep to the cultural customs of the subject, we would refer to Pocahontas as Lady Rebecca.

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Lady Rebecca had another name and role or identity: Amonute. This was her medicine name, identifying her as Beloved Woman, shaman-priestess, sorcerer, adept of high degree. It was a name shared only once with the English, and as such is questioned in the pages of biographers. However, it is highly probable that she was a member of the midéwewin, the Medicine Lodge or Great Medicine Dance, a spiritual discipline widespread among the Algonquins all over North America. This society, or spiritual discipline, was concerned with various kinds of magic, healing being only one. The term medicine, like the newer word shaman, signifies that something Native is going on. Analogous words—that is, words that signify much of what these shamans and medicine people do—abound: in non-Native contexts such people are usually identified as seers, priestesses, priests, or wizards. Many of the actions these trained spiritual adepts take do things that defy our present understanding of how things work, do things that material laws of the old physics don’t account for. Among these are teleporting objects, soul walking, rain bringing, clear seeing, prophecy, finding water or any lost object or person, even protecting soldiers from a particular community. Carrying out a World Renewal Ceremony, while not a common practice, is sufficiently widespread among Native practitioners to make it likely that it was such a ceremony, on an almost unimaginable scale, that Amonute, Pocahontas as high priestess, along with the matchacómoco, the Great Council of the Powhatan Alliance, was engaged in… .

Old Men’s Tales

As it has been recorded in history, film, fiction, poetry, and biography, the story of Pocahontas is largely a story about the heroic John Smith and the survival of a hardy band of English Christians who came to the tsenacommacah (“Virginia,” as the newcomers named it). They came to bring civilization to the savage, Christianity to the heathen, and to light the flame of personal liberty, democracy, and the American way of life.

They were aided and abetted in this noble enterprise by a single Indian maiden named Matoaka, but usually called by her nickname, Pocahontas. This “little wanton,” as some translated her nickname, sided with the bearded strangers despite the king, her father, Powhatan’s anger. She remained loyal to the strangers despite their depredations against her own people, even despite the cruel rejection from Captain John Smith, the man she loved so truly. It is a story told and retold; its outlines are as familiar to Americans as our ideas about the American way of life… .

So Pocahontas entered Western history; the Beloved Woman, shaman-priestess and eventual weroanskaa (female leader) of the Powhatan Alliance. She was a woman of many roles and heroic stature, and her four names contain her life’s history. Her familiar name, the one she is most known by, was Pocahontas. Her clan or personal name was Matoaka or Matoaks. Her sacred or priestess name was Amonute. Her Christian name was Lady Rebecca Rolfe. Thus began the great ceremony that would lead to the formation of the largest and wealthiest nation the world has yet seen.

In the short span of her life, which was a bit more than twenty years, she would set in motion a chain of events that would ensure the dominance of the manito-aki in global life and affairs, usher in a period of terrible decline for her people, liberate the starving and miserable peoples of Europe and beyond, and introduce to a world awakening from feudalist absolutism the idea of egalitarianism, personal responsibility, and autonomy and the initiation of peaceful methods as a way of negotiating national and cultural differences. She would be involved in a great world change in these ways because it was the role of a Beloved Woman to do these things, and, because it was a time of vast change, it was the responsibility of a particularly able Beloved Woman to do so. That woman, as the manito seem to have decreed, was Pocahontas. Among the several roles she filled, the primary one may have been her role as Beloved Woman. Particularly important during times of conflict between the community and its external adversaries, a woman who held this office would find herself called on to decide whether any captives—leaders and warriors alike—would be executed. Her decision was final; no man or woman could override it. The universal symbol of office for such women was one or more white feathers. In the case of the manitowinini, this badge of office would have been seen as connecting to the sacred story of Sky Woman, whose plummet through the void was arrested by waterfowl—symbolized by white feathers or, on prepubescent women, by white down.

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Because Pocahontas is always depicted with white feathers, the major symbol of the office of Beloved Woman, and because of the role she played in the ceremony during which John Smith’s fate—and that of his fellow travelers—was decided, and because he specifically mentioned that the girl who saved him had her hair adorned with white down feathers, we can safely identify her as one who held the office.

In historic times there were fewer Beloved Women than it seems were present during Pocahontas’s lifetime. This is because, or so one supposes, this was the time before the precipitous decline in the population of Algonquin and other Native Nations in the Southeast. These were, however, times in which conflict was increasing and strangers were seen, or reported, throughout the regions where the office of Beloved Woman was common practice. In turn, this widespread sense of threat was dramatically intensified by prophecies of imminent doom well known among them. So, for a variety of reasons, Pocahontas was not the only Beloved Woman (or Beloved Woman in training) among the Powhatans. Significantly, she was the one who, for whatever reason, flung her small body over Smith’s and in that gesture determined that he would live… .

(2004)