Pocahontas (19 page)

***

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.

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.

*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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