Instructions
A controversy is a disagreement. In history, controversies often present as two opposing viewpoints. However, often, only one side makes it into the history textbooks. Should the other side be told?
For your follow up essay, analytically examine history that some say was covered up regarding the life and death of Pocahontas.
The following are further directions for the assignment:
A new history, written by the Mattaponi Indian tribe, focused on concerning the life and death of Pocahontas. Please read the The Pocahontas Archive (http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/trial/pocahontas/mattaponi.php) and also watch https://www.c-span.org/video/?202747-2/true-story-pocahontas.
The Mattaponi tribe claims in their new book that English settlers captured, raped and impregnated Pocahontas before her marriage to John Rolfe. To cover up this English abuse, John Rolfe agreed to marry Pocahontas in order to prevent war over her treatment and to protect his tobacco crop. The tribe also claimed that Pocahontas was already married to a Mattaponi man named Kocoum and had a son, but the Colonial government viewed the marriage null and void since it did not occur in a Christian Church. She was forced to travel to England in order to help Rolfe save his people and keep hers from annihilation. This presents the story of Pocahontas more like a murder mystery than a rescue love story that many of us have been exposed to throughout our lives.
Remember, people arranged marriages to guarantee land and protection. Some historians claim that Pocahontas was a needed insurance policy for plantation farmers, like Rolfe, and the relationship between the two to be a necessary evil to protect the assets of the English tobacco industry.
Research this further in the library and at Case Study: Pocahontas (attached reading doc). Using at least one academic source, critically analyze this new development in the Pocahontas story. Summarize what you learned from the Mattaponi tribe. Include in your analysis, the debate between historians of European descent and those that are Native American about how to write the history of Indian peoples
300 words
1 academic source, 1 reference from the reading
