Pocahontas and the Powhatan dilemma : an American portrait / Camilla Townsend.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Townsend, Camilla, 1965-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Pocahontas, -1617.

Pocahontas.

Powhatan women--Biography.

Powhatan women.

Powhatan Indians--History--Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775.

Powhatan Indians.

Powhatan Indians--Government relations.

Rolfe, John.

History.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xi, 223 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Hill and Wang, [2004]

Summary:

Camilla Townsend's stunning new book differs from all previous biographies of Pocahontas in capturing how similar seventeenth-century Native Americans were -- in the way they saw, understood, and struggled to control their world -- not only to the invading English, but also to ourselves. Neither naive nor innocent, Indians like Pocahontas and her father, the powerful king Powhatan, confronted the vast might of the English with sophistication, diplomacy, and violence. Indeed, Pocahontas's life is a testament to the subtle intelligence that Native Americans, always aware of their material disadvantages, brought against the military power of the colonizing English. Resistance, espionage, collaboration, deception: Pocahontas's life is shown here as a road map of Native American strategies of defiance exercised in the face of overwhelming odds and in the hope of a semblance of independence worth the name. Townsend's Pocahontas emerges -- as a young child on the banks of the Chesapeake, an influential noblewoman visiting a struggling Jamestown, an English gentlewoman in London -- for the first time in three dimensions, allowing us to see and sympathize with her people as never before.

Contents:

1 Amonute's People 3

2 What the English Knew 25

3 First Contact 44

4 Jamestown 66

5 Kidnapped 85

6 Imprisonment 107

7 Pocahontas and John 124

8 In London Town 135

9 1622, and Queen Cockacoeske 159.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [179]-213) and index.

ISBN:

0809095300

OCLC:

56604063