The Pocahontas Exception, Real and Imagined

I bet you are wondering whether this is going to be about the senior senator from Massachusetts who is currently running for president and attracting the name “Pocahontas” as a racial epithet by the incumbent or about the historical girl of that name whose collision with English settlers defined her entire life? It’s about both, an attempt to show how two cultural tropes — both with tenuous connections to reality — collided.

Let’s start with as much reality as we can discern in the 21st century about somebody who born in the 16th century. We know Pocahontas was an Indian girl from an Algonquian-speaking tribe and she was a real, historical person. All else is contested.

Pocahontas is said to have been a daughter of Powhatan, a Very Important Person among (probably) the people known today as Pamunkey, living in what we now call Virginia. Understanding of Indian political offices suffered in translation, a problem aggravated by a strong undercurrent of nonsense that to this day claims American Indians were innocent of sophisticated governmental forms until shown the way by white people. This would be the same white people who at the time were representatives of a feudal society just beginning to experiment with the privately held but Royally chartered corporation.

Put more plainly, Indians had representative government at a time when Europeans still had kings who claimed God anointed them. Some people today understand Powhatan to have been important enough that he was principal chief of…