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The Virginia Company
The name given by the Powhatan people to their homeland, the region now known as the Virginia Tidewater.
Tsenacomoco Quotes in Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma
The Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma quotes below are all either spoken by Tsenacomoco or refer to Tsenacomoco. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Preface
Quotes
Myths can lend meaning to our days, and they can inspire wonderful movies. They are also deadly to our understanding. They diminish the influence of facts, and a historical figure’s ability to make us think; they diminish our ability to see with fresh eyes.
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Chapter 1
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When the two cultures met and entered a power struggle over land and resources, it would turn out that, unbeknownst to either side, they had been in something like a technological race for centuries. And the cultural heirs of people who had been full-time agriculturalists for eleven thousand years rather than a few hundred had already won.
None of this made an individual white man one whit more intelligent or more perceptive than an individual Indian—just better informed and better armed.
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Chapter 8
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Attanoughskomouck? It was always a struggle to capture an Indian word phonetically, but the word that the English represented elsewhere as “Tsenacomoc(o)”—that is, the Indians’ name for their own country—clearly peeps out of the confusion. […] This rendition was obviously the result of Matoaka’s sounding it out for a Dutchman, just as it was undoubtedly the woman herself who insisted on using the name Matoaka rather than her more famous and attention-grabbing nickname, which everyone else was using. She knew Pocahontas was a name for a child; they did not.
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Get the entire Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma LitChart as a printable PDF.
Tsenacomoco Term Timeline in Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma
The timeline below shows where the term Tsenacomoco appears in Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: Amonute’s People
...canoe, paddled by messengers bearing news, heads down a tributary among the rivers of the Tsenacomoco—the region known today as the Virginia Tidewater. They are headed toward Werowocomoco, the main settlement...
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...in 1603, yet another incident occurred. An English ship arrived in the middle of the Tsenacomoco territory, where the Rappahannock tribe lived. They seized many Rappahannock men and left, and the...
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Having lived in the region for 300 years by Pocahontas’s time, the Tsenacomoco tribes keep maps and notch sticks to denote quantities. Though there was is written language,...
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...begun approaching the advances that come with agrarian life millennia earlier, the tribes of the Tsenacomoco were further behind on that timeline. Unbeknownst to both groups, Townsend writes, “something like a...
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Several months after the strangers arrive on Tsenacomoco land in 1607, December arrives, and Pocahontas’s people prepare for the long winter ahead. Then,...
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Chapter 3: First Contact
When Powhatan asks Smith about the settlers’ purpose in Tsenacomoco, Smith likely lies and states that they were stranded and waiting for help to return,...
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...in their debt by sending them gifts of corn and crops. The warriors of the Tsenacomoco tribes aren’t the only ones who wanted metal goods—the women who worked hard as harvesters...
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Chapter 8: In London Town
...appears—as does the word Attanoughskomouck, likely a phonetic spelling of Pocahontas’s homeland’s own true name: Tsenacomoco.
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