Names Symbol Analysis

As a work of history and anthropology, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma is not a particularly symbolic text. However, throughout Camilla Townsend’s reconstruction of life for both the Powhatan people and the English settlers who colonized their lands beginning in the 1600s, one symbol does emerge. Throughout the text, names (and the ways in which others bestow nicknames, baptismal names, and married names upon Pocahontas in particular) symbolize the many unpredictable—and occasionally unwelcome—changes which transpire throughout one’s life. Pocahontas’s life, in particular, was marked by many names: Amonute, her childhood name, and Pocahontas, her nickname meaning “mischief” or “little wanton one”; Matoaka, her adult name taken during her first marriage to a warrior named Kocoom; and at last Rebecca, the biblical name assigned to her by Reverend Alexander Whitaker. The name Rebecca was given to Pocahontas during her baptism in hopes that she would favor white colonists over her own people—just as the Rebekah of the Bible favored her pale son, Jacob, over her ruddy son, Esau.

Though the many names Pocahontas had throughout her life symbolize her uniquely chaotic and unstable circumstances, Townsend also suggests that there is a lighter symbolism behind the use of ever-changing names in the tradition of the Algonkian tribes. Pocahontas would have grown up expecting her name to change over the course of her life. In this way, Townsend suggests that names—so central to Western ideals of identity—may have allowed Pocahontas to gather strength from the unfair and often unwelcome changes in her life, dictated by those who sought to use her as a political pawn from her early childhood. While the English and Spanish colonists who arrived in the New World attempted to control their captives by bestowing new names upon them, Townsend suggests that for a member of the Powhatan tribes, being stripped of his or her name would not have been traumatic or dehumanizing, though that was certainly the goal of renaming. Instead, to an individual who expected to go through life with several names, it would merely have marked a new phase of life to be moved through.