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Henry ended up being charged with treason based on information provided by Robert-the two seem to have become rival interpreters for Powhatan’s successor, Opechancanough-though the English complained that Robert too had “even turned heathen” and was “proving very dishonest.” They occasionally seemed to risk their own lives to warn one side of violence by the other. The boys were sometimes asked to carry false or duplicitous messages, or were perceived as spies. There were inevitable errors in translation. Often, living in this state of “forced fluidity,” as Kupperman describes it, carried risks. “…the idea may have been just to throw these kids in with the Indians and see what happened.” And like Pocahontas, they developed close relationships with their hosts. Like Pocahontas, they acted as translators and negotiators, their job to “understand the other from the inside and interpret the other’s culture and language for their own people,” Kupperman writes. Intertwined with her story in Kupperman’s telling are those of three English boys-Thomas Savage, Henry Spelman, and Robert Poole-with whom she crossed paths when they were sent to live with Native leaders.
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It is, of course, impossible to know what Pocahontas thought about any of this Kupperman stipulates that when it comes to sources for the period, “we have no Native of the Americas speaking or writing in her or his own voice.” But if Pocahontas felt conflicted about her role as a go-between, she wouldn’t have been the only one. With Pocahontas-now behaving as an English woman would, her tattoos covered up with the English fashions of the time-as an example of a successful Virginian conversion, the company received 100 pounds raised in parishes all over England for “the Lady Rebecca” to use “for the education of the children of those barbarians.” But she died in Gravesend at about 20-of European diseases, a broken heart at the thought of asking her people to renounce their customs, or both-before she could return home and complete the mission. Then in 1616, the Virginia Company shipped the family, along with 10 or 12 Native men, to London for a kind of publicity tour.
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She taught Rolfe how to cultivate a profitable tobacco crop, and the couple had a son, Thomas, in 1615. There, she learned about Christianity from a Puritan minister named Alexander Whitaker, was baptized as “Rebecca,” and married the widower John Rolfe in 1614-despite an earlier marriage to a Native man named Kocoum. Argall’s original plan was to trade her for tools, corn, and Englishmen held by her father, but instead she was kept as a prisoner at Jamestown. It was only a few years later that relations between the colonists and the Powhatans had deteriorated into war and Captain Samuel Argall kidnapped Pocahontas. The incident where she seemed to risk her own life to save Smith’s, Kupperman and other historians conclude, was probably actually part of an established ceremony where Pocahontas was playing a scripted role.īut she must’ve been bright, because Powhatan began sending her with his envoys as a trade emissary to Jamestown, where she brought food to the starving colonists in exchange for tools and weapons. The daughter of Wahunsenaca (also known as Powhatan), who ruled over a group of Algonquian-speaking tribes-known as Powhatans-in the coastal region of what is now Virginia, Pocahontas was just 10 years old when the English colonists founded Jamestown in 1607. In Pocahontas and the English Boys (NYU Press 2019) New York University professor emerita Karen Ordahl Kupperman peels back more than 400 years of legend-the “good Indian” stereotypes, the convenient love stories, the painting “with all the colors of the wind.” “In the modern retelling, she’s not a 10-year-old girl-she’s a sex object.” And then there’s the recent-and maybe unprecedented-use of her name by a sitting president to mock a US senator over her claim to Native American heritage.