Content area
Full text
Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown * Helen C. Rountree * Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005 * xii, 292 pp. * $29.95
As the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown approaches, promising to make 2007 a year of commemorations and fresh scholarly assessments of such familiar historical actors and events as Captain John Smith and the settlement of Virginia, it is an open and altogether pressing question how Native Americans will fit in the festivities. The story of 1607 simply registers differently depending on whether we see it through early modern English or Native American eyes. For this reason, and because the stakes are so high, we are deeply indebted to Helen Rountree for this timely book. On one level a biography of the three Powhatan Indians most familiar to us from the story of Jamestown's founding-Pocahontas; her father, the "paramount chief" Powhatan; and his relation and most prominent successor, Opechancanough-it is also nothing less than an effort to understand that story from a...