Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma: Preface Summary & Analysis

Camilla Townsend imagines what Pocahontas, upon arriving in England toward the end of her life, might have felt upon spying the grey country for the first time. Townsend implores her readers to recognize that Pocahontas “was a real person” long before she was a “myth” and “icon.” Myth, Townsend warns, is “deadly to our understanding” of truth.

Townsend writes that while popular culture has emphasized Pocahontas’s love of the English and the friendly relations between the English settlers who established Jamestown, the first British colony in the Americas to survive, the truth is something much darker: the settlers blackmailed, tortured, and killed the Algonkian-speaking tribes who surrounded their settlement, and seven took Pocahontas prisoner in hopes of bending her father, Powhatan’s, will. Pocahontas, Townsend says, “deserves better” than the fanciful myths that have sprung up around her. Pocahontas was brave, intrepid, and self-sacrificing in the face of racism, imprisonment, and the ravages of colonialism. In studying the true facts of her remarkable life, Townsend asserts, she hopes readers will learn not only about Pocahontas’s life, but about the realities of America’s past.