‘Poca’-haunted Dems face hit on name

The progressive renaming movement is knocking on the door of the Powhatan and Pocahontas Democratic Club of Queens, and the 120-year-old borough machine might just answer.

The club — long a home base for traditional Democrats such as former party boss and US Rep. Joe Crowley, state Sen. Michael Gianaris

and Borough President Melinda Katz — announced it’s establishing a committee “that will formulate justifications both for and against the name change.”

For Native Americans, the choice is clear.

“They shouldn’t use Pocahontas,” said Chief W. Frank Adams of the Upper Mattaponi Tribe, one of eight existing tribes today linked to the Powhatan confederation of Virginia.

“Powhatan, he was a chief, a leader, so I don’t have any problem with that. Pocahontas, she was his daughter, a child. She was an ambassador for her people in some way, but she wasn’t a hero; so no, I don’t think they should use her name.”

The story of a romance between the Native American girl and European settler John Smith has been debunked by historians.

Pocahontas, whose real name was Amonute, was 10 years old when the English arrived in what would become Virginia in the early 17th century.

The colonists kidnapped and raped her, forced her to marry an Englishman and return with them to Britain, historians say.

The Astoria Democrats adopted the Pocahontas name when its women’s club, dubbed the Pocahontas Regular Democratic Club, and men’s club, named Powhatan, merged in the 1990s.