Pocahontas

by Joseph Bruchac

What do you call this?

  Kator neheigh mattagh neer uttapitchewayne.

  Truly he is there, I do not lie.

  Kekaten Pokahontas patiaquagh ningh tanks manotyens neer mowchick rawrenock audowgh.

  Bid Pokohontas bring here two little baskets, and I will give her white beads for a necklace.

  Mache, neheigh yowrough, Orapaks.

  Now he lives far away at Orapaks.

  Mowchick woyawgh tawgh noetragh kaquere mecher?

  I am very hungry, what shall I eat?

  Spaughtynere keragh werowance Mawmarinough kekaten wawgh.

  Run you to the werowance Mawmarynough and bid him come here.

  Tawnor neheigh Powhatan?

  Where lives Powhatan?

  Uttapitchewayne anpechitchs nehawper werowocomoco.

  You lie, he stays at Werowocomoco.

  Utteke, e peya weyack wighwhip.

  You go, and come again quickly.

  NUMBERS

  necut: one

  ningh: two

  nuss: three

  yowgh: four

  paranske: five

  comotinch: six

  toppawass: seven

  nusswash: eight

  kekatawgh: nine

  kaskeke: ten

  ninghsapooeksku: twenty

  nussapooeksku: thirty

  yowghapooeksku: forty

  parankestasspooesku: fifty

  comotinchtasspooesku: sixty

  toppawasstasspooesku: seventy

  nusswashtasspooesku: eighty

  kekatawghtasspooesku: ninety

  necuttoughtysinough: one hundred

  necuttweunquaough: one thousand

  PLACE NAMES

  Chesepiock: Chesapeake Bay

  Chickahominy: name of a river and also the Native people to the north of the Powhatans, not part of Powhatan's alliance

  Kecoughtan: village at the head of the Chesapeake Bay

  Paspahegh: Powhatan village on whose hunting lands Jamestown is built

  Powhatan: principal village of the Powhatans upriver on the "James River," near the falls, where the werowance is one of Powhatan's sons

  Rasawrack: literally, "in between" or "at the fork"; hunting camp where Smith is taken; also the name of the chief town of the Monacans

  Werowocomoco: Powhatan's town, about fifteen miles north of Jamestown

  NATIVE PEOPLE

  Amocis: Powhatan man sent to observe the English

  Naukaquawis: Pocahontas's brother

  Nauiraus: Appamattuck man who guides Smith

  Opechancanough: youngest half brother of Powhatan

  Opitchapam: Younger, lame brother of Powhatan

  Opposunoquonuske: weroansqua of the Appamattucks

  Pocahontas/Matoaka/Amonute: favorite daughter of Powhatan

  Powhatan/Wahunsonacock: Mamanatowic (paramount chief) of the Powhatan people

  Rawhunt: elderly aide to Powhatan

  Uttomatomakkin: Powhatan priest

  Wowinchopunck: werowance of Paspahegh

  A Note on the Stories of Pocahontas

  I have tried to set the tone for each of the chapters by beginning them, in the case of John Smith, with a quote taken from a writer of the period, and, in the case of Pocahontas, with a Powhatan story. It is easy to indicate the sources of those quotes from the English (and one Spanish) chroniclers of the early seventeeth century. But where did I find the Powhatan stories?

  I have reconstructed a series of tales by working from a combination of written documents, oral tradition, and intuition. John Smith's voluminous writings, of course, provide one source of such information, since he often describes Powhatan Indian customs and traditions with some accuracy—despite the fact that his interpretations are sometimes wrong. But other writers of the period also provide insights into Powhatan story-telling.

  The History of Travel into Virginia Brittania was completed by William Strachey in 1612. It then reposed in manuscript form in the British Library for 237 years before being published in 1849 by the Hakluyt Society. In Chapter 7 of that volume can be found a relatively detailed telling of the Great Hare creation story, as it was related to Captain Samuel Argall by Henry Spelman, a teenage English boy who had been sent to live among the Indians and learn their language. (Spelman became a friend of Pocahontas's, and she saved his life on at least one occasion.) Certain other stories, which I have either read or heard in fragments, I have tried to reconstruct, keeping in mind the structure of Algonquin languages and the Powhatan worldview.

  Two of the stories I attribute to the Powhatan people in this work of fiction are stories that, for a number of reasons, I believe were part of the Powhatan traditional canon of tales. These stories were known among Algonquin nations to the north and south of the Powhatans, and certain stories—such as that of the Great Bear or of Raccoon and his black mask—appear to have been almost universally known among the many Algonquin peoples. We come by stories in many ways—by listening to elders, by reading, by watching the natural world, and by hearing them on the wind. More than once I have told a tale that I thought had come to me purely from my imagination, only to find it was, indeed, a traditional story.

  In short, all of the tellings in this book are in my own words, but they are firmly based on Powhatan and eastern Algonquin traditions.

  A Note on Sources, Hearing More than One Side...

  The writing of this novel required a great deal of research and thought over many years. I have long been interested in the story of the Jamestown Colony and its impact on the lives of the Powhatan peoples, who both resisted and assisted those frequently wrongheaded first colonists. The real stories of John Smith and Pocahontas have seldom been fully told, much as they are a part of the popular imagination—even more since the highly distorted Disney movie a few years ago. To tell this story well, I thought, more than one voice and more than one point of view would be needed.

  I then chose to look through the eyes of both the original Americans and the newcomers from England. I needed to see the same events from a European perspective at one moment and from an Indian one at the next. I found myself thankful for having studied the Elizabethan period while an undergraduate at Corned University and having maintained an interest in the poetry and drama of the early seventeenth century (including teaching and producing the plays of Shakespeare in Ghana, West Africa, where I was a volunteer teacher from 1966 to 1969). The many English chroniclers who wrote so wed and so much about this period from firsthand knowledge of the events were much like Shakespeare in their love for and their intoxication with the English language. There is real music in the turns of phrase to be found in the journals of John Smith, the observations of George Percy and Gabriell Archer, and even in Edward Maria Wingfield's self-serving A Discourse of Virginia. For anyone wishing to gain a sense of that period as described by such chroniclers, I highly recommend Edward Wright Haile's marvelous 1998 compilation, Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony. Interested readers might then move on to Philip L. Barbour's quite amazing three-volume set, The Complete Works of Captain John Smith.

  Virginia has an incredibly rich history. Regular summer trips to visit my great-uncle Orvis Dunham in Warm Springs, Virginia, were an important part of my childhood and first sparked my interest in Jamestown. Back then, though, half a century ago, there was much less to see at Jamestown than there is now. The fifteen-hundred-acre island, which became part of the Colonial National Historical Park in 1933, is largely deserted, and the loop road that runs through the island passes through forests and marshes that look much as they did five centuries ago. However, there is now a National Parks Service visitors' center that shows a fine film about the hardships of the first years of Jamestown.

  It was long thought that the James River, which shifted its banks over the centuries, had washed away all that remained of Jamestown. However, in the late 1980s, archaeologists found the site of the Jamestown settlement and, in 1996, the footprint of the first fort. Although a few
memorials stand on the island (including awful statues of a massively heroic John Smith and a rather pathetic Pocahontas dressed like a Plains Indian), no one lives there today and a visitor can easily find enough solitude to imagine what it was like when those first three ships swam into view.

  To see those three ships, or at least accurate, seaworthy replicas of them, one only needs to drive back across the narrow bridge from Jamestown Island to visit the state-run living history museum of Jamestown Settlement. Tied up to the pier are brightly painted, fully functioning reproductions of the 116-foot-long Susan Constant, the Godspeed and the Discovery (which is about the size of a school bus). The accurate (though, of course, sanitized) details of the stockaded fort and re-created Powhatan Indian village are further brought to life by the wed-informed people who work there, dressed in the clothing of the period and engaged in the everyday activities of the first decades of the settlement. A number of the surviving tribal nations of Virginia take an active part in the Jamestown Settlement Museum, not only as reenactors, but also in the annual Virginia Indian Heritage Festival, which takes place there every June and is cosponsored by the Virginia Indian Council. For more information and a listing of the many special events at Jamestown Settlement, visit its Web site at www.nps.gov/colo or cad (757) 229-1607.

  ***

  Among my most important scholarly resources for the Powhatan side of the story were the works of Helen C. Rountree, whose studies of the coastal peoples of Virginia have rightly been called a model of historical ethnology. The respect she enjoys among contemporary Native Americans of that region is deeply deserved. Her 1989 book, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture, is only one of her many invaluable contributions.

  I was also assisted by a number of Native people who pointed me in the right direction on more occasions than one. Prominent among those who helped me see the world through Powhatan eyes are Jack Forbes and my dear friends Powhatan Eagle and his sister Matoaka Little Eagle. It has been said that the Powhatan language is extinct, but it is also true that it has probably supplied more "loan words" to the English language than any other American Indian tongue. The most prominent lists of Powhatan words and phrases are those of John Smith from his Map of Virginia (1612) and William Strachey in The History of Travel (completed in 1612, first published in 1849), which contain about a thousand entries.

  Further, as a member of the great Algonquin language family, the structure and many of the actual words in Powhatan (such as the words to count from one to ten) are virtually the same as in my own Abenaki language. Although I have my Powhatan characters speaking in English (with occasional words in Powhatan), I have tried to "think Algonquin" in each of the chapters devoted to the point of view of Pocahontas and then translate that thought into English.

  I did something very similar in writing the John Smith chapters. To begin with (as my editor, Paula Wiseman, and the long-suffering members of my writing group know all too well), I not only used one of John Smiths own frequent devices—writing about himself in the third person—in my first draft of the book, I also copied the style and language of Smith's period, often borrowing whole sentences from Smith's own written accounts. The result was, though perhaps somewhat authentic, also certainly somewhat frustrating to read without footnotes. In my final revision, I changed these chapters to first-person narrative and simplified the language so that it conformed more (but not completely) to modern English. You'll note, though, in my novel that John Smith still occasionally insists on referring to himself in the third person.

  In seeing things from the Native American side, I have to admit that my Ph.D. in comparative literature was much less helpful than the last four decades I have spent deepening my knowledge of my own American Indian heritage by listening to and spending time with the many friends, fedow story-tellers, and elders in the Native American community who have shared and continue to share so much with me, with such great generosity.

  I often mention that one of the wisest things I was ever taught—and taught more than once—by Native elders is that ad of us have two ears. One of the reasons for that, I was told by such teachers as Swift Eagle and Harold Tantaquidgeon, was that our Creator wished us to remember that there are two sides to every story. I hope that I have listened wed enough to help my readers hear the two quite distinct sides to this tale of the first year of Jamestown Settlement.

  Selected Bibliography

  Barbour, Philip L., ed. The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, Volumes I-III. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

  Doherty, Kieran. To Conquer Is to Live: The Life of Captain John Smith of Jamestown. Breckenridge, Colo.: Twenty-First Century Books, 2001.

  Feest, Christian F. The Powhatan Tribes. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1990.

  Haile, Edward Wright, ed. Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony. Champlain, Va.: RoundHouse, 1998.

  Hume, Ivor Noel. The Virginia Adventure: Roanoke to James Towne: An Archaeological and Historical Odyssey. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1994.

  Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, ed. Captain John Smith: A Select Edition of His Writings. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

  Rountree, Helen C. Pocahontas's People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

  Rountree, Helen C. The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989.

  Smith, Julian. Virginia Handbook. Emeryville, Calif.: Moon Travel Handbooks/Avalon Travel Publishing, 1999.

  Footnotes

  *By the old reckoning of time, the new year did not begin until the spring. By modern reckoning, the arrival date of the English colonists was 1607.

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