![]() Then in 1616, the Virginia Company shipped the family, along with 10 or 12 Native men, to London for a kind of publicity tour. 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.
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