From Indian chief’s daughter to slur
Trump’s use of name Pocahontas just part of girl’s sad history
WASHINGTON — The tug of war over Pocahontas, the Indian chief’s daughter who was born on the James River and died on the Thames River, has been going on for more than 400 years.
Since the first years of the Virginia colony, the girl with a short life and a long history has been a pawn, moved this way and that to serve the interests of colonists, nations and tribes, tobacco sellers, filmmakers and activists.
Now she’s been dragged into 21st-century politics, her name regularly invoked as a slur by a U.S. president against a U.S. senator — Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. — who might try to unseat him.
President Donald Trump has tweeted: “Pocahontas (the bad version), sometimes referred to as Elizabeth Warren, is getting slammed. She took a bogus DNA test and it showed that she may be 1/1024, far less than the average American. Now Cherokee Nation denies her, ‘DNA test is useless.’ Even they don’t want her. Phony!”
Appearing in a presidential tweet is only the latest incarnation of a name that first showed up in colonial reports written by quill and then in 17th-century London newspapers. After a long absence from public attention, she reappears in the discourse of antebellum Virginia, celebrated as the first ally of white settlers in the New World.
“They were sick of hearing about the pilgrims and the Mayflower as the beginning of it all, when really it all began in Virginia,” said Helen Rountree, a professor emeritus of anthropology at Old Dominion University. “They were trying to assert a national identity, and they used her to do it.”
In 1995, Pocahontas joined the pantheon of modern Disney princesses in an animated blockbuster that has played out ever since on DVDs and in academic papers alike. Books, re-enactors and toy makers have all put their spin on Pocahontas.
Whatever the myths, her real life was a painful one. She lost a husband, left her homeland and died abroad, all by her early 20s. The historical record is conflicted and controversial, but there are settled facts. Her real name was Matoaka, Warren and she was born in about 1596 to a Powhatan chief ruling over more than 30 Algonquinspeaking tribes, according to the National Park Service history of the Jamestown Colony site. Pocahontas was a nickname, often translated as “playful one.”
The English settled Jamestown in 1607. Relations with the native residents were mixed, with the Powhatans providing food. Pocahontas, often portrayed as an 11- or 12-yearold, frequently accompanied deliveries of food to the English and became something of a darling to them.
English Capt. John Smith, in later years, related the story of Pocahontas saving his life at a time of conflict with the tribe, stopping the blow that would have killed him by placing her head on his. This drama driven by a maiden’s love has been irresistible to storytellers from the colonists to Disney animators.
But today’s Pamunkey Indians, descendants of Pocahontas’s tribe, cite oral tradition to contend that she would have seen Smith as an elder to be honored and that his life was unlikely to have been in danger.
In any case, Smith went back to England, and Pocahontas married a man from a related tribe. In 1613, a new English captain, Samuel Argall, kidnapped Pocahontas as a way of gaining leverage over her chieftain father. He had her lured aboard his ship and then demanded a ransom for her release.
The captive was placed in the care of an English priest, Alexander Whitaker, who reportedly instructed her in English and Christianity. By the colonists’ telling, she converted and fell in love with one of the settlers, John Rolfe. They wed with her father’s blessing (her husband agreed to a divorce), she was baptized “Rebecca” and the couple left for England.
By the Pamunkey telling, she left her people because she was dragged or duped, acquiescing only because it was the best way to help her people. Rather than being in a love match, Pocahontas was a prop the English would use to promote the colony in London.
Pocahontas toured the British capital with her husband and their new son. They had just embarked on a return trip to Virginia in 1617 when she fell ill and was taken ashore at Gravesend, died and was buried there. Researchers note that a dysentery outbreak was reported aboard.
Rolfe returned to the colony, and, eventually, so did their son, Thomas. They became part of the state’s genealogical fabric, and Pocahontas’s line extends down the generations.
Robert E. Lee’s wife, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, could claim her as an ancestor, as could Edith Wilson, first lady to President Woodrow Wilson. And she is an ancestor of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.