Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat

Carl Rollyson

"Nothing less than a watershed event in the historiography of the Americas."

Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Allen is a pathfinder."

Wall Street Journal

[In] Ms. Allen’s spirited revision, [she] insists that Pocahontas cannot be understood except within an Algonquin Indian context.

Oakland Tribune

"Paula Gunn Allen, a pioneer of Native American literary studies, tells Pocahontas’ story from the Indian perspective."

San Francisco Chronicle

"This is not your typical biography. It couldn’t be."

Wall Street Journal

[In] Ms. Allen’s spirited revision, [she] insists that Pocahontas cannot be understood except within an Algonquin Indian context.

San Francisco Chronicle

“This is not your typical biography. It couldn’t be.”

Oakland Tribune

“Paula Gunn Allen, a pioneer of Native American literary studies, tells Pocahontas’ story from the Indian perspective.”

Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Allen is a pathfinder.”

Publishers Weekly

In what is presented as the first study of its kind by an American Indian scholar, Allen (The Sacred Hoop) offers a corrective to the romantic story of Pocahontas told initially by Capt. John Smith of the Virginia Company and most recently by Disney Studios. Euro-American historical accounts of Pocahontas's brief life, asserts Allen, typically depict her as a lovelorn and tragic character (she died in 1617 in the aptly named river port of Gravesend, England, at the age of 20 or 21). Allen's Pocahontas, by contrast, is a real visionary, a prodigiously gifted young woman fervently devoted to the spiritual traditions of her people: a loose-knit group of Algonquin tribes known as the Powhatan Alliance, or Tsenacommacah. When the English colonists who began establishing Jamestown in 1607 invaded the Tsenacommacah, Pocahontas immediately identified it as the fulfillment of a prophecy that foretold the end of their world and the beginning of a new one, argues Allen. It was "world change time," she writes, and Pocahontas (also called Matoaka, Amonute and finally Lady Rebecca Rolfe) was nothing if not mutable-as implied by the book's subtitle. Still, notwithstanding Pocahontas's significant role in American history, Allen's claims that Pocahontas "set in motion a chain of events that would," among other things, "liberate the starving and miserable peoples of Europe and beyond" can seem overstated. More persuasive are Allen's comments about the cultural similarities between the English and Algonquin and the idea that each group changed the other. When casting Pocahontas as "the embodiment of this dual cultural transformation," her role, and the book, are at their clearest, and are made manifest by Allen's often lyrical and powerful writing. (On sale Oct. 7) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Allen (English, emerita, UCLA) flaunts her Native American heritage in order to differentiate her "biography" of Pocahontas from those written by nonnatives. It is the native perspective that apparently gives her license to construct an image of Pocahontas as a "shaman-priestess, sorcerer, adept of high degree" without any cited evidence, unless one accepts a supposed probability that she was a member of the Midewewin (a secret society of medicine men and women). Allen treats this probability as fact and uses it as the book's lynchpin, which, in turn, allows her to sprinkle her feminist Native American perspective liberally throughout. Despite Allen's claims, this native perspective is suspect at best since she is of Laguna Pueblo/Metis and Sioux descent, while Pocahontas was a Powhatan and thus Algonquin. This book is not recommended; libraries needing authoritative biographical information on Native American women, including Pocahontas, should instead purchase the outstanding anthology Sifters: Native American Women's Lives, edited by Theda Perdue.-John Burch, Campbellsville Univ. Lib., KY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.