American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Pocahontas, whose name means “Playful Little Girl,” is perhaps one of the most romantic and gallant figures of early American history. However, the 1995 Disney movie has fancifully contributed another American Indian myth to U.S. history by omitting major elements of her young life and artificially contriving others. Pocahontas did save the life of John Smith, the leader of the first American settlement at Jamestown, when she was only a girl, but she did not fall in love with him and did not marry him, as the movie depicts. She was widowed while still a teenager and then married John Rolfe, later secretary of the colony of Jamestown, whose own wife and child had just died. She became a Christian, learned English, sailed to England and was received at the court of James I. She died at the age of twenty-two, just as she was beginning a return journey to America. She is buried at Gravesend, a few miles from London, on the Thames River. Pocahontas was the first Christian Native American, the first who spoke English, and the first Native American who had a child by an Englishman. Her place is extremely significant in North American history and in the relationship between early Europeans and native peoples. Over the western rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., she is memorialized on a marble frieze that depicts her rescue of John Smith.