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To Whom Does Pocahontas Belong? A Case of Competing Claims
Frederic W Gleach As heritage becomes positively valued, in economic markets as well as the marketplace of ideas, competing claims from different groups become increasingly common. It is not unusual now for members of dominant colonial or postcolonial societies to claim and deploy as part of “their” heritage characteristics or exemplars of the indigenous peoples they have displaced. One indigenous group’s heritage may also be claimed by other groups, or proclaimed as heritage that is generic at some level. Examples could be drawn from around the world, but here I focus on a case that is returning to widespread public gaze with the approach of the 400th anniversary of the settlement at Jamestown, that of the 17th-century Powhatan Indian, Pocahontas. Whether or not one accepts the famous account of Pocahontas’s rescue of Captain John Smith as factual, by the 19th century she was being taken up as an almost totemic figure. The poet William Watson Waldron, in his 1841 Pocahontas, Princess of Virginia, and Other Poems, proclaimed her “one of those characters, rarely appearing on the theatre of life, which no age can claim, no country appropriate. She is the property of mankind [sic], serving as a beacon to light us on our way, instruct us in our duty, and show us what the human mind is capable of performing when abandoned to its own operations.” White Virginians adopted Pocahontas as fictive Mother for a southern origin of the US (competing with the hegemonic histories emphasizing the Pilgrims being generated by powerful university-based scholars in the Northeast), and the First Families of Virginia (otherwise effectively lily-white) proudly admitted her descendants. The surviving Powhatan tribes in the 19th century began performing the rescue incident to claim their historical place in Virginia and US history.
These various claims on Pocahontas continued through the 20th century. While racist State Registrar Walter Plecker was trying to erase Virginia’s Indians from the records, even the 1924 Virginia Racial Integrity Law excepted those whose non-Caucasian ancestry was 1/16 or less to accommodate the “white” descendants of Pocahontas. Powhatan Indians performed again the rescue at the 1907 Jamestown Exposition and other forums, and featured the story on pottery made from roughly mid-century. Literary versions of Pocahontas proliferated, and an animated Disney film in 1995 spread a bastardized representation to children around the world. Early in the 21st century—if not before—Pocahontas was also claimed as part of a generic North American Indian heritage, at least by some. When casting was being done for the forthcoming Terence Malick film “The New World” (a fictionalized version of the story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith), the Internet was abuzz with complaints by non-Powhatan Native women who were turned down for the part of Pocahontas, and by others somehow offended by the casting decisions. It seemed that it was acceptable by many to cast a non-Powhatan woman, but not someone who failed to meet their definition of “Native.” Vicious attacks were launched at the young woman chosen to play Pocahontas, whose personal heritage includes North and South American Native peoples as well as non-Native Americans. Interestingly, few if any of these attacks came from Virginia Native people—who nevertheless were and are split in their opinions of the film and its making. It will be interesting to watch the reactions when “The New World” is released this fall, and the ways that different groups lay claim to Pocahontas and her Native heritage through the 2007 anniversary. But there is no question that the diverse claims on that heritage will continue, at least as long as value is seen in the connection. Why some heritages become valued over others in the first place is a different question. Selected works on Pocahontas's Heritage Abrams, Ann Uhry. The
Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival Myths of American Origin.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Frederic W Gleach is a senior lecturer and collections curator at Cornell University, and a historical anthropologist with primary research interests in Native North America and Puerto Rico. This author has published “Controlled Speculation and Constructed Myths: The Saga of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith.” In Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native History (2003) and “Pocahontas at the Fair: Crafting Identities at the 1907 Jamestown Exposition.” Ethnohistory, 50(3): 419–445. (2003). Further reading on Pocahontas is listed at www.aaanet.org. Gleach can be contacted at fwg1@cornell.edu or fwg2@twcny.rr.com. |
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