3 Pride and Prejudice
The Pocahontas Myth and the Pamunkey
Christian F. Feest
Late in 1607, when the Jamestown colony was plagued by a dangerous relationship between scanty food supplies and excessive factional strife, Captain John Smith ventured into Chickahominy Indian country to trade for corn. When exploring the country beyond their lands at the end of his foraging trip, he was apprehended by a sizable detachment of warriors of the Powhatan chiefdom as a suspect in the murder case of a Rappahannock Indian, who had been killed a few years earlier by an unidentified Englishman. Although Smith was cleared of this charge, he was taken before Powhatan at Pamunkey, tried, and (as far as he could make out) sentenced to death on more general grounds. Just as the tawny executioners readied themselves to knock out the Captain’s brains, Pocahontas—Powhatan’s favorite daughter (and cherished subject of later romantic biographers)—threw herself over the Captain’s stocky body and thereby presumably saved his life (figure 3.1).
Later the noble teenager intervened repeatedly to extend economic aid and political advice to Smith and the fledgling colony. After Smith returned to England, Pocahontas disappeared from the colonists’ view, and a moderately cold war ensued between the natives and these alien squatters. When, in 1613, Captain Samuel Argall had to go all the way to the Potomacs’ territory to trade for corn, he encountered Pocahontas again. Seizing her as a hostage, Argall carried the young woman to Jamestown to extort peace from Powhatan. Pocahontas was soon moved to the settlement at Henrico where she was instructed in the doctrines of Christianity, to which she readily converted. The following year she eventually proved instrumental in mediating peace between her father’s people and those of her newly acquired fiancé—John Rolfe, the pioneer of English tobacco cultivation in Virginia. This was a second marriage for both. Pocahontas (now Mrs. Rebecca Rolfe) gave birth to Thomas Rolfe in 1615, and a year later went to England with husband and son, where she was introduced to Queen Anne and unexpectedly met John Smith again. As she was preparing to return to Virginia in early 1617, Mrs. Rolfe—or Pocahontas—fell ill and died at Gravesend. The lasting power of images of this young woman and her associations with America’s pioneer founders is evident in the title and jacket blurb of Leon Phillips’ 1973 First Lady of America: a Romanticized Biography of Pocahontas, where she is touted for as being as “relevant today as she was in 1612 ... a woman of enormous power and intellect” (compare Barbour 1970).
Many thousand pages of scholarly and literary writing have been devoted to the Pocahontas story. This is not the place to reevaluate the source materials or to argue the facts behind the tale. It is the myth itself, so dear to the American public, and its use by Powhatan’s surviving children—the contemporary Indians of coastal Virginia—which deserves and will get a close scrutiny in this essay.
The Pocahontas-Smith-Rolfe story has all the distinctive features of an American origin myth. Of much significance is the era when what had been a colorful local story achieved nationwide popularity. Before the 1800s, Pocahontas and her role were little known outside Virginia. Thereafter the developing nation began to build and to catalog its own mythology, accounts of hero figures and basic values of America’s beginning cast in epic form. Among these nationally favored tales was that of Pocahontas who, by repeatedly safeguarding the very existence of the first English colony on American soil, was drawn in an early image of Manifest Destiny. At the same time, likely of greater importance, Pocahontas was made to symbolize a virginal native America, for her representation was merged with the older Indian Queen and Indian Princess images. In mythic form, by saving Smith she legitimizes the Anglo-American presence in North America. By marrying Rolfe she conveys the aboriginals’ title to the land to the English colonists and accepts a dependent status for native Americans. By her early death she makes room for Euroamerican expansion as all good Indians should do. For Virginians there were additional dimensions: her alleged contribution to her husband’s experiments with tobacco cultivation helped to establish the basis for Virginia’s economic prosperity, while through her son, Thomas, she infused the blood of native American “royalty” into the veins of the colonial elite.
During the eighteenth century, some thoughtful Virginians lamented that so few colonists had followed John Rolfe’s example in marrying an Indian woman, because such unions would have established a better claim to the land. Extolling the benefits of native American-immigrant American conjugal ties, William Byrd II concluded: “Besides, the poor Indians would have had less reason to complain that the English took their lands, if they had received it by way of a marriage portion with their daughters” (Wright 1966:160). A few decades later, Peter Fontaine agreed that “if . . . we had taken Indian wives in the first place, it would have been some compensation for their lands .... We should [have] become the rightful heirs to their lands” (Maury 1872:350). Interestingly, these eighteenth-century sentiments conflicted with the existing laws of Virginia, which since 1691 had outlawed interracial marriage (Hening 1810-1823, 3:86-8). The nineteenth-century Pocahontas story, however, was obviously not concerned with the quantities of Indian woman-American male marriages: a single richly symbolic case served the explanatory purposes of myth-making much better.
The mythopoeic treatment of the Pocahontas-Rolfe episode confirmed later American intentions to include native peoples in their Melting Pot ideology and policies—to solve the Indian problem by fusing the latter’s identity with their own. Nineteenth-century racial integrity laws in the South stressed this with a powerful jural distinction: the Indian might hope ultimately to become White; but the slightest touch of “Black blood” destined those so stigmatized to a perpetual Negro or Colored social category (Rountree 1986:179-80).
The actual experiences of the Algonquian tribes of coastal Virginia after the death of Pocahontas offer some striking contrasts to the sentiments embodied in the later Pocahontas myth (Feest 1978; and Rountree 1979). Recognizing that the peace brought about by Pocahontas would not keep the English colonists from their expansionist goals, the natives rose in 1622 in an attempt to rid themselves of the nail in their flesh. The English retaliated by declaring a war of extermination that lasted for ten years and continued on a lower level of intensity until 1644, when Powhatan’s brother and heir, Opechancanough, launched a final, but unsuccessful counteroffensive. The peace agreement of 1646 at last relegated the native peoples to that dependent and tributary status which, although hoped for by the English colonists, had not automatically resulted from the Pocahontas-Rolfe marriage.
After 1646 the Algonquian peoples of Virginia were quickly becoming an insignificant factor both politically and militarily. As tribal populations rapidly decreased, reservation land was allotted to the tribes on a per capita basis, but even these small patches became increasingly subject to the encroachment of the rapidly growing populations of colonial neighbors. Military and political conquest had proved to be a much more effective means for obtaining possession of the country than either interracial marriage or the proposed Christianity-for-land deal which had figured so prominently in early promotional literature. In this respect, Pocahontas’s conversion to Christianity remained an extremely uncommon case for many decades. No systematic missionary work was undertaken among the reservation groups, although their dependent status would have eased the labor of proselytizing them. Instead, Indian parents were encouraged to indenture their children as servants to English households, where they were to be reared in Christian civilization. In much idealized theory such children would eventually become integrated into English colonial society. But as a rule Indian children placed in English settlements only became separated and alienated from their natal communities. One serious consequence was that these young people lost the benefits associated with the status of “tribal Indian” as recognized by the colony (and later the state); they ended up dangerously close to the category labeled “free persons of color.”
This came to pass in 1705, when legislation effectively placed the Indians of Virginia on the “colored” side of a system of biracial classification. Because of the tributary system, for some years those Indians who remained on the tiny reservations had the better of it. In this system the groups based on lands allotted them—the “tribes”—paid an annual tribute of arrows or game to the governor. This symbolic transaction brought in return continued recognition and, hopefully, the government’s protection as well. This relationship, and the annual delivery of tribute to the governor of Virginia, continues to the present day (see figure 3.6). During the eighteenth century, trustees for the reservation communities or tribes were appointed by the legislature, who were to advise the tributaries, especially in matters relating to their lands. However, whatever their inclinations these appointed custodians had not the power to halt the steady shrinking of lands reserved for Indian occupation. Eventually, all such reservations disappeared, except the divided one today inhabited by descendents of the Pamunkey and Mattaponi.
This process was accompanied by a gradual loss of traditional Virginia Algonquian culture, which made it increasingly difficult for tribes and individuals visibly to signal their “Indian” identity. Bark-covered barrel-roofed houses gave way to wooden log and frame structures; traditional skin dresses were exchanged for cloth or cotton garments; native languages ceased to be used and were mostly forgotten by the early nineteenth century; and most Indians on and off the reservations became Baptists. English surnames became common during the late seventeenth century. One such was “Captain John West,” the son of the “Queen of Pamunkey” at the time of Bacon’s Rebellion, probably named after his natural father, Colonel John West of New Kent County. Others may have received their English names as indentured servants from their masters. The name Langston, for example, which is current to this day among the Pamunkey, is first documented as an Indian name (as well as that of a English landowner) as early as 1691. One of few long-surviving native crafts among the Pamunkey was pottery making, which was abandoned only in the 1890s. This lack of obvious identity markers made it next to impossible for the nonreservation populations to evade classification as “colored” by their Virginian neighbors (see Rountree 1986).
The complaint of William Byrd and Peter Fontaine that none had followed John Rolfe’s example is not well founded. However, since such unions were disdained by elite Virginians, these couples and their offspring (or only the offspring if illegitimate like “Captain John West”) usually ended up with their Indian not their Anglo-colonial kin. An early and well documented case is that of John Basse who in 1638 “Marrid Keziah Elizabeth Tucker, dafter of Robin the Elder of ye Nansimuns Kingdom, a Baptized Xtian, in Holy Matrimonie accdg to ye Canons of ye Church of England,” though his brother Edward “departed from his Life among the Showanocks in Carolina” in 1696. John Basse became the ancestor of the Bass family among the Nansemond of Southside Virginia, who despite loss of their reservation have succeeded in retaining their identity until today (Bell 1961:11, 12). Other cases are less well documented, but the Bradbys among the Pamunkey and Chickahominy claim descent from a White man who married a Chickahominy woman at the time of the American Revolution. Similar claims are or were made by the Winns among the Chickahominy, the Byrd and Nelson families among the Rappahannock, and by the Newtons among the Potomac. Contrary to hopes raised by the model of Pocahontas, however, these marriages did not result in a general fusion of native Virginian and emigrant Virginian identities. In all these cases the White men chose to live with the Indians and raise their children as Indians.
Although denying the occurrence of such marriages, Virginians were quick to suspect a “blackening” of Indian blood through interbreeding with their African slaves in less formal unions. No doubt such consensual relations occurred, especially among the nonreservation groups, many of whom claimed to have been forced into such relationships by their masters so their children could become slaves. On the other hand, the groups with reservations quickly saw the danger to their legal status of marriages to Blacks. Hence such couples and their offspring were banned from tribal lands and probably joined nonreservation groups or the “free colored” segment of Virginia’s population.
Pamunkey tribal law, amended as of 1887, leaves no doubt about their seriousness on this point. The first clause reads: “No Member of the Pamunkey Indian Tribe shall intermarry with any Nation except White or Indian under penalty of forfeiting their rights in Town.” 1 On the whole, Virginia Algonquians succeeded well in meeting the specifications of “purity of blood” required by Virginia’s race laws. After his first visit to the Pamunkey reservation, James Mooney commented, “I was surprised to find them so Indian, the Indian blood being probably nearly ¾, the rest white, with a strain of negro. Some would pass unquestioned in any western tribe” (Mooney 1899). To retain their rights and their identity as Indians they had to and did accept the common forms of White prejudice against their Black neighbors, though they were often themselves suspected to be mulattos hiding under veneer of Indianness.
In the absence of clearly visible cultural symbols of their Indian status and with pressures mounting to distinguish themselves from the Colored category after Reconstruction, Virginia Algonquians had to find ways to establish their separate identity. Certificates of Indian descent had been issued by local authorities during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but these were simply not enough (see, e.g., Bell 1961:15-16). Indian men wore their straight black hair to shoulder length both before and after the Civil War to proclaim their racial purity and their Indianness. And concerted efforts were made to attract Indians of federally recognized tribes to settle on the Virginian reservations, there to marry local Indians. Moreover, a group of Catawbas had lived with the Pamunkey some time after 1800 but had returned to South Carolina taking some Pamunkeys with them; and during the Civil War, a group of Chickahominies fled to Canada, one of them returning after the end of the war with an Ojibwa wife (Stern 1952:206).
Terrill Bradby, who served one term as chief of the Pamunkey during the 1890s, apparently actively pursued the promotion of immigration of non-Virginian Indians to the Virginia reservations. In 1893 the Pamunkey authorized Bradby to “visit the Indian Bureau in Washington and in all other Departments and Indian tribes, and also to visit the Columbian Exposition in Chicago,” where he was made Honorary Assistant in the Department of Ethnology by Frederick Ward Putnam. The Indian Journal of Muskogee, Oklahoma, reported that the intention of the Pamunkey delegation to Chicago had been “to invite other civilized Indians to come and settle on their reservation and amalgamate with their tribe. The Pamunkeys have rich lands, are in prosperous circumstances, but they have entermarried for so long that the tribe is danger of extinction. The delegates took the precaution of obtaining from the government of Virginia a certificate to the effect that they were genuine Indians and had a secure tenure of their lands.” 2
According to information gathered by John Garland Pollard in 1893 and publicized more widely by the Washington Evening Star on 25 April 1894, their hopes were now concentrated upon the North Carolina Cher-okees. “The Pamunkeys have a great deal of race pride,” the Evening Star indicated, “They are very anxious to keep their blood free from further mingling with that of other races, and how to accomplish this purpose is a serious problem of theirs, inasmuch as they recognize the danger of too frequent marriage within the pale of consanguinity. To obviate this difficulty the chief men have been trying to devise a plan by which they may induce immigration from the Cherokees of North Carolina.” 3 Already existing relationships between the Cherokee and the Pamunkey were brought to Bradby’s attention only in 1899: “In the East Cherokee Tribe was found descendants of Mary Screechowl. She was originally from this tribe, though they had lost sight of her” (Anonymous 1899). But these attempts appear to have met with little success. It was not until the Chickahominy started to send their children to Bacone College in Oklahoma for higher education that members of other tribes occasionally married into Virginia Algonquian groups (Rountree 1972:88).
At about the same time—in the 1880s—the Pamunkey began to use the Pocahontas story to validate their Indian identity in the eyes and minds of their contemporaries: White, Black, and Red. This development should be seen as a profound emotional plea for a redefinition of their status in Virginia’s race-class hierarchy. The Pocahontas story was of special value because it established a base for common ground between the Pamunkey and their neighbors, for the myth was long dear to other Virginians. But the Pamunkey drew different conclusions from the same mythic premises. Essentially, this process conformed to earlier Pamunkey practice—the adoption of broadly American criteria and symbols for defining their Indian identity. This tactic, the Pamunkey had learned, aided them in communicating their point of view.
The major vehicle used to transport the message to the public was a play reenacting Pocahontas’s role in the salvation of Captain John Smith’s life. This dramatic scene was more or less regularly performed between at least 1881 and 1915. It was probably intended as a reminder of the debt owed by Virginians to the Indians, of the old alliance between these peoples, and the fact that Powhatan’s children were still alive—if not well—in Virginia. Our information on this pageant comes from a variety of sources. The earliest known photograph of Virginia Algonquians, for example, shows a Pamunkey troupe staging what is labeled as the “John Smith Play” at the Yorktown Centennial in 1881 (figure 3.2).
In this photograph John Smith is seated in the center of the picture, flanked by Pocahontas and Powhatan on his right and two Pamunkeys in American costumes on the left. Behind them one female and eight male Indians are dressed in fringed and partially beaded cloth shirts, with feather headdresses of a type widely used among Eastern tribes in the late nineteenth century (Dräger 1975). The figures are shown holding symbolic artifacts: bows, arrows, hafted stone axes, a multistemmed clay pipe of local manufacture, and a wooden ball-headed club. The club is of exactly the same type as that shown in the 1624 illustration of the episode (compare fig. 1). Other than these 1624 and 1881 visual representations of such ball-headed clubs, we have little evidence that such weapons were used by Virginia Algonquians. The Pamunkey and neighboring Indians may well have been copying older European print images of their dress and technology. In fact, during the 1920s, pioneer anthropologist Frank Speck obtained from the Pamunkey for museum collections a broken example of the same type of club, but he reported little about its recent use (Speck 1928:350). The club collected by Speck may possibly have been the one shown in the 1881 photograph, in use as a prop for the living historical tableau. Not to leave the Pamunkey empty-handed, this anthropologist later delivered Micmac clubs of a similar type to them. The clothing shown in the 1881 photograph are of a generic neo-Indian variety, and resemble stage costumes more than anything else. They are less fully beaded than examples dating from around 1900 and later (see figures 3.4 and 3.6). Moreover, we can assume that the idea of the play itself as well as some of the details shown were inspired by one of many Smith-Pocahontas plays written and performed by the citizens of Virginia during the nineteenth-century.
The 1881 performance was by no means the last, for an 1898 broadside advertising a performance that year gives both the real and stage names of the Pamunkey actors (figure 3.3). But in the later performance Pamunkey dramatis personae were joined by a powerful ally: next to the Smith-Pocahontas duo stands the figure of early nineteenth-century America’s favorite pan-Indian hero, Tecumseh. And next to these four are several others whose stage names are not easily associated with historic figures. One such was “Deerfoot,” played by Evans Bradby, a name that provides a tantalizing clue. This was the nom de course of Lewis Bennett (c. 1830-1895), a Seneca Indian athlete from Cattaraugus reservation in upstate New York, who had achieved celebrity status in England in 1861-1862 when he competed and won against most English competitors in long-distance races. Although when in his own land Bennett “had dressed up in good store clothes without paint or polish,” he pleased his British audiences by staging an Indian fashion show for their benefit. Photographs made during his sojourn in London indicate that at least one of his costumes closely resembled the Pamunkey fashions of 1881 (figure 3.5). It is not entirely clear where the Virginia Indians may have seen him compete, but it seems that after returning to the U.S., Deerfoot retained his track name, maybe his costume as well, and that he ran wherever opportunities offered themselves. Terrill Bradby may have met him at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, but this was long after the original borrowing of his professional name, costume, and identity for the Pamunkey tableau (see Cumming 1981:51-62).
An item found under the headline “Pamunkeys Want a Sea Trip” in the Washington Chronicle of July 9, 1899, reports that tribal officials were planning to discuss their grievances with the governor of Virginia.
One of the principal matters to be brought to Governor Tyler’s attention will be the appeal of the tribe to have a suitable representation at the Paris Exposition. They want the State to give them financial aid to enable them to send over a creditable company to produce a play representing the saving of Cap. John Smith’s life by Pocahontas. It is understood the cast of characters has already been selected. Among those who it is proposed will take part are Dead Shot Panther, Big Smoker, and Lone Trailer, all of whom occupy high official places in the councils of the tribe.4
A word of caution is in order—these “Indian names” were probably invented by the news writer to ridicule the Pamunkeys. In any event, the planned trip failed to receive Governor Tyler’s financial support, who declared that Virginia had no authority in that matter. But the petition shows the desire of the Pamunkey to win recognition as Indians wherever possible.
In October 1899, anthropologist James Mooney of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology and photographer De-Lancey Gill came to visit the Pamunkey reservation. The Richmond Times of December 3, 1899, printed a letter “from one of the most intelligent members of the tribe” (possibly Terrill Bradby) relating to Mooney’s visit, who is described as having been sent “to hunt up a history of these people .... With him he had a photographer, who took pictures of ten families, also that of Powhatan and his warriors, which made an exceedingly fine looking picture. The picture was a representation of Pocahontas saving the life of Captain John Smith” (Anonymous 1899; see figure 3.4). This image shows the same cast as billed in 1898, except T.W. Langston, T.S. Dennis, and John Dennis were absent. So there was a Pocahontas with no Captain John Smith to save. Little Captola Cook, likely an apprentice Pocahontas, is also shown. Some of the costumes are of the same type as those worn in 1881 but others are much more extravagant. Bows, arrows, and a hafted stone axe are used, but the ball-headed club is missing.
By 1915 the play had become but one part of a larger “Forefathers’ Festival” held each spring on the Pamunkey Reservation. A report in the Cedar Rapids Gazette reported that on this occasion the “tribe goes into the woods and re-enacts the story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. Some maiden of the tribe, probably today much like the princess of old, plays the leading part” (Anonymous 1916). But after 1915 there is no further indication that the Pocahontas-Smith play was performed again. Then, in the late 1930s and early 1940s some Pamunkeys, Chick-ahominies, and Mattaponis participated in an annual pageant staged on May 23, celebrating the anniversary of the first meeting between the English colonists and Powhatan (historically really “Little Powhatan,” the head chief’s son). This was sponsored by the Powhatan Hill Memorial Association, and in distinction to the earlier Pocahontas-Smith play it was organized by Whites with Indian participation. Of the acts billed for the 1898 program, only the Snake Dance (hallowed by its long distance association with the famous Hopi ceremony of the same name) apparently survived to 1940.5
There is other evidence, however, relating to the importance of the Pocahontas myth to the Virginia Algonquians. A missionary visiting Pamunkey in 1915 (almost three centuries too late) offered the following observation gathered in the Indians’ houses. There he saw: “On the walls, a copy of the original picture of Mrs. John Rolfe number two, better known as the Princess Pocahontas, and perhaps an old time print of Capt. John Smith, a character even at this day revered by these Indians” (Gordon 1915:9). We may have doubts regarding the reasons for the alleged Indian sympathies for Smith, whose record as a friend of the Indians is—to say the least—equivocal. As part of the Pocahontas myth, however, his role was notably important to the Pamunkey. In contrast, if readers have not already noticed, conspicuously absent between 1881 and 1920 from all Pamunkey celebrations of the 1607 meeting and engagement was the figure of John Rolfe. This is especially noteworthy, for he had become their relative by marriage to Pocahontas. This relationship the Pamunkey certified later in the seventeenth century with the gift of a tract of land to Thomas Rolfe, which shows that this affinal tie was acknowledged by them as binding for some decades. Why the late nineteenth-century Pamunkey dropped his role in organizing and casting their pageant presents a puzzle. A useful interpretation is that the Pamunkey sense of their own history shifted with changes in their place in Virginia society. Their overriding concern in the late nineteenth century was to redefine their position—as Indians. Denying John Rolfe’s role, and symbolically that of the numerous other later Englishmen who had married Pamunkey women, further reinforced their “racial purity” and the culturally redefined boundary between themselves and other Virginians.
That the Pamunkey (likely joined by other Virginia Algonquians) must have identified themselves with the Pocahontas-Smith play is shown by a change in naming patterns. Before 1880 given names tended to be of the ordinary Anglo-Christian variety. Then—abruptly—names from the play began to be given to children. George Major Cook, who took the part of “Cayatanita,” named one of his daughters Pocahontas and one of his sons (who like his father became chief of the Pamunkey) Tecumseh Deerfoot. Among the Mattaponi we find Powhatan Major, and among Chickahominy children of this generation some were named Pocahontas and even Opechancanough, which was usually shortened to “O.P.” (see Speck 1928).
Given the importance of the Pocahontas-Smith story and play for the Pamunkey around 1900, it seems odd that none of the anthropologists who did fieldwork among the Virginia tribes during the twentieth century paid any attention to it. There is no trace of it in the voluminous published and unpublished data collected by Frank G. Speck (whose major Pamunkey informant was George M. Cook) and his students. Tecumseh Deerfoot Cook, today in his eighties, could remember his father going with other Pamunkeys to Jamestown Festival Park around the time of the Jamestown Tricentennial in 1907 to perform some kind of play or dance, but he neither could remember what it was about, nor did he appreciate that his own name had come straight out of the script.
Though the Pocahontas-Smith pageant is no longer performed by the Pamunkey, the story continues to be important as a key symbol of their distinctive identity and their special relationship to American society. The myth lives on in a new art form. Pottery making was revived in 1932 when a pottery school was opened on the reservation with financial aid from the state of Virginia (figure 3.7). Brightly painted and glazed wares in this newly invented traditional style continue to be made by a few Pamunkey ladies of the older generation for sale to tourists. Some of these pots and plates are decorated with a kind of picture writing also of twentieth-century origin and itself an attempt to produce something that could be recognized as “Indian” by other Virginians.
The story most often told in these pictographs is that of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. The Pamunkey translation (which once again stresses the aspects of friendship between Indians and Whites) reads as follows: “1. Indians 2. while hunting 3. discover 4. white man 5. standing 6. in shallow water 7. Indians 8. agree 9. to kill white man 10. at chiefs seat 11. Indian maiden 12. disagrees with 13. Indian men 14. (and) makes no harm for 15. white man 16. but good wishes” (figures 3.8 and 3.9). In this manner, an event of no great world-historical significance lives on symbolically, perpetuated by the few surviving Pamunkey, used by them to fix their identity and to win the hearts and minds of Captain John Smith’s children.
This essay is based in part on research done in 1972-1973 when I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. It is a somewhat revised version of the original in the European Review of Native American Studies 1 (1):5-12, 1987, where additional notes and full references may be found.
Notes
1See Pollard 1894:16; a more recent version of Pamunkey legal exclusion is cited by Rountree 1972:74.
2Indian Journal, Muskogee, Eufaula, Indian Territory, August 3, 1893. A news clipping in Gatschet c. 1894-1900).
3News clipping in Gatschet, c. 1894-1900; also see Pollard 1894:11.
4News clipping in Gatschet, c. 1894-1900.
5Richmond Times-Newsleader archives, Richmond, Virginia, clippings of May 20, 1937 and May, 4, 1940.
References
Anonymous. 1899. “Remnant of a Powerful Tribe.” Richmond Times, December 3, 1899.
Anonymous. 1916. “Travelette—Indian Town.” Reprinted from Cedar Rapids, IA Gazette. In The Indian School Journal 16:369.
Barbour, Phillip L. 1970. Pocahantas and Her World: A Chronicle of America’s First Settlement. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Bell, Albert D. 1961. Bass Families of the South Rocky Mount, NC.
Cumming, John. 1981. Runners and Walkers, a Nineteenth Century Sports Chronicle. Chicago: Regnery Gateway
Dräger, Lother. 1975. “Federhauben bei Indianer des östlichen Nordamerika.” Jahrbuch des Museum für Völkerkunde Leipzig 30:191-204.
Feest, Christian F. 1978. “Virginia Algonquians.” In Handbook of North American Indians—Northeast, Vol. 15. Bruce Trigger, ed. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. 253-270.
Gatschet, Albert S. 1894-1900. “Pamunkey Notebook.” Manuscript 2197, Nation al Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
Gordon, Rev. Philip B. 1915. “The Remnants of Powhatan’s Tribe.” The Indian Leader 19:9-11.
Hening, William Waller, ed. 1809-1823. Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia. 13 volumes. Richmond-Philadelphia.
Maury, Ann, ed. 1872. Memoirs of a Huguenot Family. New York: G. P. Putnam.
Mooney, James. 1899. Letter to W. J. McGee, Savannah, Georgia, October 22, 1899. Bureau of American Ethnology Correspondence, National An-throplogical Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
Phillips, Leon. 1973. First Lady of America: a Romanticized Biography of Pocahontas. Richmond, VA: Westover.
Pollard, John Garland. 1894. The Pamunkey Indians of Virginia. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 17. Washington, DC.
Rountree, Helen C. 1972. “Powhatan’s Descendants in the Modern World.” The Chesopiean 10 (3).
Rountree, Helen C. 1979. “The Indians of Virginia: The Third Race in a Biracial State.” In Southeastern Indians Since the Removal Era. W. L. Williams, ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 27-48.
Rountree, Helen C. 1986 “Ethnicity among the ‘Citizen’ Indians of Tidewater Virginia 1800-1930.” In Strategies for Survival. Frank W. Porter, ed. New York: Greenwood.
Smith, John. 1624. The Generali Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles. London.
Speck, Frank G. 1928. “Chapters on the Ethnology of the Powhatan Tribes of Virginia.” Indian Notes and Monographs 1 (5).
Stern, Theodore. 1952. “Chickahominy: The Changing Culture of a Virginia Indian Community.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 96: 157-225.
Wright, Louis B., ed. 1966. The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Figure 3.1 Pocahontas saves the life of Captain John Smith. Part of an engraving by Robert Vaughan for Smith (1624). Photo courtesy Library of Congress.
Figure 3.2 Pamunkey Indians dressed for performance of “John Smith Play” at Yorktown Centennial. Photo courtesy Virginia Historical Society.
Figure 3.3 Handbill announcing the Pamunkey Indians’ Pocahontas-Smith play. Manuscript 4969. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
Figure 3.4 “Deerfoot” (Lewis Bennett) In London, 1861. Photograph by George Newbold, London. Photo courtesy Museum of Mankind London.
Figure 3.5 Pamunkey Indians dressed for the Pocahontas-Smith play, 1899. Left to right: William Bradby, J.T. Dennis, Howard Lee Allmond, William Terrill Bradby, T.T. Dennis, George M. Cook, Captola Cook, Rev. Alex E.R. Allmond. Photograph by DeLancey Gill. Photo courtesy National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
Figure 3.6 Pamunkey Indians paying annual tribute to the governor of Virginia, ca. 1930. Left to right: unidentified man, Dora Cook, George M. Cook, Gov. Harry Byrd, Pocahontas Cook, George Cook Jr., Jim Bradby, Tecumseh Deerfoot Cook. Photograph by Dementi Studio, Richmond. Author’s collection.
Figure 3.7 The Invented Indian Pottery school on the Pamunkey reservation, ca. 1932. Photograph by Dementi Studio, Richmond. Author’s collection.
Figure 3.8 The pictographic story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith, Pamunkey, ca» 1970. Mimeographed. Museum für Völkerkunde, Wien (Christian F. Feest collection).
Figure 3.9 Pottery vessel with pictographic story of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas, by Daisy Bradby, Pamunkey, ca. 1970. Museum für Völkerkunde, Wien, cat. no, 154.194 (Christian F. Feest collection). Photograph by Fritz Mandl.