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After
Pocahontas
Life
in this new land proved to be brief for Pocahontas. On March
17th, 1617, she died from an infection in Gravesend, England
at the age of twenty-two. Immediately, the tenuous peace between
the Powhatan and the English crumbled and the brutality rose
on both sides. The English took to drowning the children of
conquered villages, and the elite Powhatan warriors were able
to kill off one third of the Jamestown colonists in a single
battle.
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A
17th century map of the Virginia territory.
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But
more settlers kept crossing the Atlantic. When Powhatan himself
died the year after his famous daughter, things began to unravel
for his hard won confederacy.
"They
had just begun to organize when the Europeans showed up, and
those first stages tend to be very unstable," says Hall. "The
English had the good luck to land among one of the weaker
tribes. Had they landed among the Iriquois, there would have
been a lot of failed colonies."
Conflict
between the Powhatan and the English raged on for decades.
In 1646, the exhausted remaining Powhatan signed the first
treaty in history between the English and Native Americans.
The treaty restricted the members of Powhatan's once-powerful
confederacy to small reservations and required them to pay
an annual tax of twenty beaver skins to the English crown.
By 1669, just 1,800 Powhatan remained.
Pocahontas Today
In
1995, Disney released the animated film Pocahontas,
in which a full-grown Indian Princess falls in love with John
Smith. When he returns to England, the lovers must part forever
because Pocahontas realizes her home is in the woods with
the Powhatan.
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"And so
it was that another generation was spoon-fed one of America's
fondest myths at our expense," writes Roy Crazy Horse,
Chief of the Powhatan Renape Nation.
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Disney
never claimed historical accuracy, and one could argue that
the film's talking animals send a clear signal that the movie
is fiction, not fact. Nevertheless, the production introduced
the Pocahontas myth to millions of kids, in America and globally,
many of whom will receive no further education in America's
less than family friendly origins.
"And
so it was that another generation was spoon-fed one of America's
fondest myths at our expense," writes Roy Crazy Horse, Chief
of the Powhatan Renape Nation on their Web site.
In
response, members of the Powhatan Renape Nation wrote, produced
and performed their own play, The One Called Pocahontas, in
1996. With their play, today's Powhatans sought to set the
record straight, for this generation as well as future ones.
"We
simply set out the truth as we know it," Chief Crazy Horse
writes, "so that we might use the past as a foundation for
understanding the present." 
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