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These days, Pocahontas may be best known from her comely character in The Disney Co.'s popular 1995 animated film.
A new Richmond exhibit shows how Pocahontas' legend has been portrayed, including in a 1953 film poster (center right) where John Smith subdues the 'savage.'
American artist Howard Chandler Christy's 1911 painting 'Pocahontas' hangs in the portrayals portion of the exhibit.
Henry Brueckner's 1855 oil painting 'The Marriage of Pocahontas' is on display at the Virginia Historical Society.
Part of the Virginia Historical Society's exhibit displays artists' widely varying images of the Indian and her remarkable life.
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SHE'S ALTERNATELY America's first sex symbol, our own Joan of Arc and the Mother of Our Country.
Or all three.
Or she's someone who sold Virginia Indian tribes down the river because of a crush.
To some, she was a pawn.
To virtually everyone, she's an icon.
"To some, she is a heroine, but to others, she's a betrayer," said Barry Richardson, a Haliwa-Saponi Indian from Warren County, N.C., who puts on educational powwow events.
Regardless of point of view, Pocahontas has fascinated not just America but the world, for the 400 years since the Jamestown colony gave the English a permanent foothold on this continent in 1607.
Some historians say that were it not for young Pocahontas' help in providing them with food, the colonists probably would have starved.
And, if that had happened, observes Chief Robert "Two Eagles" Green of Stafford County's Patawomack Tribe, virtually all Americans might be speaking Spanish or French right now.
Roll up Gandhi, Bill Clinton, Marilyn Monroe, Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears into one powerful persona, and you still wouldn't create the kind of enduring star power, controversy and just plain heat generated by the native woman who died at 22.
In her own time, her people were often treated as savages by the British, but Pocahontas herself was a media star even English royals were excited to meet.
Part of it has to do with the disputed story that she saved the life of Jamestown leader John Smith.
But as is the case with most celebrities today, Pocahontas' fame was, and still is, fueled by sex appeal. In pop-culture portrayals, she has always been seen as a beautiful princess right out of a fairy tale.
The Jamestown settlement and all that flowed from it was no fairy tale. But as one of the young daughters of Wahunsonacock, powerful ruler of a confederacy that included many tribes and extended from Delaware through Maryland to eastern Virginia, she had status among her people and the colonists.
Whether Pocahontas was acting on her own or as an agent of her father--whose title was Powhatan--in her dealings with Smith and the colonists is a matter of debate among historians and Indians.
"She was a peace symbol for her father," said Angela "Silver Star" Daniel, who has co-authored a new book--"The True Story of Pocahontas"-- with Mattaponi tribal historian Linwood "Little Bear" Custalow. "But the political power was coming from her father," Daniel said.
As portrayed in the 2006 film, "The New World," Pocahontas visited the Patawomeck tribe on Marlborough Point in Stafford County at the mouth of Potomac Creek and was abducted there by the English. The site, on Indian Point, was one of two Patawomeck settlements--the other was at Passapatanzy in King George County.
Green said Pocahontas' mother may have been a member of the Patawomeck tribe, since her father had a wife in every village and she seemed to be visiting relatives there when she was abducted by the English.
A TROVE OF ARTIFACTSAmong the many images of Pocahontas over the centuries now on display in a new exhibit at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond are:
A poster from the 1953 movie "Captain John Smith and Pocahontas" in which Smith is subduing the "savage" Pocahontas.
An artist's cell frame from the animated 1995 Disney movie "Pocahontas."
A 1990s Pocahontas lunch box marketed by Disney.
William M.S. Rasmussen, one the of exhibition curators, said portrayals of Pocahontas as a beauty--including in the Disney film--are probably accurate, although people's idea of what is beautiful changes from era to era. "If she didn't have some attractiveness to her, I don't suppose they would have brought her to England," he said.
Backers of the Jamestown colony and its mercantile parent, the Virginia Company, used her in a public-relations campaign.
While departing England on a ship, she fell ill, and was taken to an inn at Gravesend, 25 miles from London on the Thames River. Pocahontas died there, and is buried in a nearby churchyard.
Long after her death, she has continued to stir passions.
In the 1800s, when a painting would portray the Indian princess as "coarse" or "dowdy," rather than "beautiful and delicate," Rasmussen said, there would be public outrage.
Early renderings show a young woman with high cheekbones, a dimpled chin and an overbite.
Rasmussen said some painters "wanted to make her look more English," and that Disney deserves some credit for offering a more Indian-like portrayal of Pocahontas.
Disney has been widely criticized for its movie, but the curator noted that the filmmakers sent their artists to study contemporary American Indian women.
And even though the film's comely image of the Indian princess has been derisively compared to that of a current-day supermodel, Rasmussen said it may not be all that far off the mark.
Some of the contemporary Indian women the filmmakers looked at "are absolutely beautiful--there's no denying that," he said. "They based their drawings on the fact that these women are beautiful."
The Disney film has also been criticized for taking artistic license with history.
Putting that in perspective, Rasmussen said that over the past four centuries, plays and novels portraying Pocahontas "always changed the story to suit whatever agenda was on the table at the time."
He noted that a play written by George Washington Parke Custis of Arlington moved the John Smith rescue scene from the beginning of the story to the end, just as the Disney film did.
"The story," he said, "has always twisted to sell."
And, he said, accusations that the Disney film sexualized Pocahontas are probably way off base.
Rasmussen, University of Mary Washington anthropologist Margaret Huber and noted Virginia historian Helen Rountree all say Pocahontas was almost certainly nude when she met Smith and the other colonists at about age 10. They say young girls in her tribe wore no clothes. When they reached puberty, they dressed in a sort of a deerskin apron, but remained topless.
"There is a quote that she was cartwheeling through the the streets of Jamestown naked," Rasmussen said.
Her real name was Matoaka, meaning "flower between two streams," Daniel said.
English settler William Strachey wrote of the naked girl who cavorted with the boys of Jamestown.
"But there was nothing sexy about that in the eyes of the native people," UMW's Huber said. "She was a child. It was completely innocent."
"Pocahontas" was her mother's name, and a childhood nickname that she later took as her own. Some say it means "little wanton" or "little plaything," Daniel observed, but the Mattaponi interpret it as "playful" or "joyful."
In the Disney film, the Indian princess is portrayed as a being of superior wisdom and spirituality, a wise soul who just happens to be beautiful.
Though it was an animated film intended for children, Disney's "Pocahontas" was compelling enough that it has been translated into nearly 20 languages.
There are 120,000 entries related to the film on the Internet video site YouTube. On the site, Pocahontas sings "Colors of the Wind" in Turkish, Mandarin, Hebrew, Korean, Castillian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Swedish, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Spanish, Italian, French Canadian, Japanese and Slovak.
American novelist Herman Melville wrote in his 1857 book "The Confidence Man": "When I think of Pocahontas, I am ready to love Indians."
Now, the blog PeruProject.com has put up a post that calls the 2006 film "The New World" about Pocahontas and John Smith "a tool of empowerment for indigenous communities."
On the Web site, a young Peruvian girl says of Q'orianka Kilcher, the pretty 16-year-old Indian girl who depicts Pocahontas in "The New World":
"I want to be like her. I want to be someone who inspires native kids to reconnect to their culture and language."
"The Baptism of Pocahontas," a 19th-century work by Virginia artist John Gadsby Chapman, is one of eight historical paintings that hang in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.
And Antonio Capellano's portrayal of Pocahontas' dubious rescue of Capt. John Smith is carved into the sandstone walls of the Rotunda, above its west door.
More recently, the Virginia Historical Society has published a book of images of the princess, down through the ages--"Pocahontas: Her Life & Legend," written by Rasmussen and Robert S. Tilton.
One image, in the 19th-century "The History of the Indian Tribes of North America," portrays Pocahontas as short and chubby, offending her admirers of the day, one of whom, artist John Gadsby Chapman, called it "coarse and unpoetical."
Chapman himself portrayed Pocahontas as lyrically beautiful.
In 1993, artist R.L. Morgan Monceaux portrayed Pocahontas as a black woman, basing his work on a 1616 engraving, created from life, by Dutch artist Simon van de Passe. Monceaux was comparing the princess' plight and that of slaves in America, since she was abducted and taken, against her will, from her native land to Europe.
In the 19th century, abolitionists called Pocahontas' white descendants who owned slaves hypocrites. The slave owners were proud of their American Indian roots, because they saw Pocahontas as being a member of royalty.
In 1924, a Virginia law against intermarriage segregated both Indians and blacks who had a certain percentage of non-Caucasian lineage, but included a loophole for wealthy whites who claimed to be descended from Pocahontas.
There was a disconnect in this prejudice. Many whites thought of Pocahontas as noble and beautiful American royalty. But they didn't want to have their children go to school with her descendants.
Among Indian peoples, Daniel said, attention was paid to the inhumanity surrounding the story and "not a lot of focus on what she looked like.
"The focus is more on [the fact that] she was ripped away from the people she loved," Daniel said.
"In that 'New World' movie, they show her standing on the deck of the ship dressed in the latest French fashion looking like she's going on this fun journey."
Michael Zitz: 540/374-5408
Email: mikez@freelancestar.com
