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Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society

Abstract

The Jamestown colonists’ accounts of their capture of Pocahontas, her reactions to life among them, and the consequences for the success of the colony differ radically from the Mattaponi Indian oral history of the same events, published in 2007. Both versions present themselves as “true” — that is, objective reporting of real events; but the fact that each inverts the other raises questions of validity and, ultimately, of historiography in general. This paper argues that the question of veracity is irrelevant to our interpretation of these accounts. Instead, we must take them as representations of a culturally conceived reality—that is, as myth. Each Pocahontas narrative represents events in terms of contemporary cultural assumptions and agendas: in the case of the English, ideas about savagery and redemption; for the Mattaponi, the moral and economic primacy of native Virginians in the history of the foundation of the colonies and, thus, of the United States. The analysis confirms the idea that the conventional distinction between history and myth is invalid because it depends on Western (i.e., “scientific”) notions about reality and its representation.

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