On This Day in History: April 5
Pocahontas
There is so much myth surrounding Pocahontas, starting with her name, which was Amonute. She also had a more private name of Matoaka. Pocahontas was a nickname that referenced her being a disobedient child. As the Pulitzer-prize winning American history professor Laurel Ulrich said, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: April 5, 1614--
You probably think that quote was from Eleanor Roosevelt, but powerful quotes are often attributed to more famous mouths. Ulrich wrote it as a student in 1976. Anyway, Pocahontas was the daughter of the leader of almost three dozen Algonquin tribes near what is now Jamestown, Virginia. The story goes that English settler John Smith was about to be executed by her father, and the young Pocahontas stepped in and rescued him from certain death. But that is probably not how shit went down. It’s believed Smith embellished the story significantly years later to garner Pocahontas an audience with the Queen of England.
The self-congratulatory version is that Pocahontas was smitten with John Smith, because those smelly Europeans were just so dashing how could she resist? It unfurls a tale of the “savage” who sees white culture, people, and religion as “superior” and embraces it. To many Native Americans, the story of Pocahontas seems terribly unrealistic.
More in-depth research reveals someone even more brave and resolute than the Disney portrayal: a woman and her people faced with a powerful and more technologically advanced invader, who used her courage and cleverness to learn their language and transform them from potential enemies into allies.
In 1609, Smith was injured and returned to England for medical care. That same year a war broke out between the colonists and Natives, leading to Pocahontas being captured in 1613. Not everyone agrees, but it seems she was treated well during her captivity, improving her English and learning about—or perhaps being indoctrinated into—Christianity. During that time, she converted and took the name Rebecca. She then met colonist John Rolfe, a hardcore Bible thumper who proclaimed to love her dearly, but worried over marrying a heathen, even though she’d been baptized. He finally decided that he, a lifelong Christian, would be saving her newly Christian soul and they were married on April 5, 1614, when Pocahontas was about 18. The marriage between them served to create peace between Jamestown and her father’s tribes.
She gave birth to a son the following year, and a year after that they traveled to London to present her to English society, saying, “Hey! Check out this savage we civilized. Isn’t that awesome? We can convert the whole lot of them to Jesus if you just give us money.” Pocahontas became a celebrity in England, and as they were preparing to return to the Americas she took ill with a mysterious disease and died in March of 1617, at approximately 21 years old.
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So she was never even with Smith? Why have we never heard of this other cunt?