Question

Looking at the poem Pocahontas to her english husband john rolfe by Paula Gunn Allen answer the following question:

how does the text invoke, oppose, or revise popular stereotypes or other misconceptions of Native Americans? How does the text represent or portray Native American culture, tradition, childhood/girlhood, womanhood, family, community, and/or identity (past and present)? Please discuss key literary devices that contribute to this portrayal as well.

Answer 1

In a way, then, Pocahontas was a kind of traitor to her people....Perhaps I am being a little too hard on her. The crucial point, it seems to me, is to remember that Pocahontas was a hostage. Would she have converted freely to Christianity if she had not been in captivity? There is no easy answer to this question other than to note that once she was free to do what she wanted, she avoided her own people like the plague....

Pocahontas was a white dream - a dream of cultural superiority.

---Charles Larson, "American Indian Fiction"

Had I not cradled you in my arms,

oh, beloved perfidious one,

you would have died.

And how many times did I pluck you

from certain death in the wilderness---

my world through which you stumbled

as though blind?

Had I not set you tasks,

your masters far across the sea

would have abandoned you ---

did abandon you, as many times

they left you

to reap the harvest of their lies.

Still you survived, oh my fair husband,

and brought them gold

wrung from a harvest I taught you

to plant. Tobacco.

It is not without irony that by this crop

your descendants die, for other

powers that you know

take part in this as in all things.

And indeed I did rescue you---

not once but a thousand thousand times

and in my arms you slept, a foolish child,

and under my protecting gaze you played,

chattering nonsense about a God

you had not wit to name. I'm sure

you wondered my silence, saying I was

a simple wanton, a savage maid,

dusky daughter of heathen sires

who cartwheeled naked through the muddy towns

learning the ways of grace only

by your firm guidance, through

your husbandly rule:

no doubt, no doubt.

I spoke little, you said.

And you listened less,

but played with your gaudy dreams

and sent ponderous missives to the throne

striving thereby to curry favor

with your king.

I saw you well. I

understood your ploys and still

protected you, going so far as to die

in your keeping---a wasting,

putrefying Christian death---and you,

deceiver, whiteman, father of my son,

survived, reaping wealth greater

than any you had ever dreamed

from what I taught you and

from the wasting of my bones.

by Paula Gunn Allen

  

Paula Gunn Allen (October 24, 1939 – May 29, 2008) was a Native American poet, literary critic, lesbian activist, and novelist. Ofmixed-race European-American and Native American descent, she identified with the Laguna Pueblo of her childhood years, the culture in which she'd grown up. She drew from its oral traditions for her fiction and poetry, and also wrote numerous essays on its themes. She edited four collections of Native American traditional stories and contemporary works, and wrote two biographies of Native American women.

In addition to her literary work, in 1986 she published a major study on the role of women in American Indian traditions, arguing that Europeans had de-emphasized the role of women in their accounts of native life because of their own patriarchal societies. It stimulated other scholarly work by feminist and Native American writers.