The following article appeared in our local newspaper today, with comments by
Helen Rountree. Dr. Rountree's latest book is "Pocahantas, Powhatan,
Opechancaough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown".

> 'New World' a good tale but, sadly, bad history
> --------------------
>
> Tamara Dietrich
>
> January 26 2006
>
> You don't have to be a Virginia Indian to be disappointed that film director
> Terrence Malick turned the story of the Jamestown settlement into what one
> local moviegoer approvingly calls a "chick flick."
>
> I haven't even seen it yet, and I'm disappointed. Why take a gritty tale of
> survival against desperate odds and dress it up in doeskin and a romance that
> never happened?
>
> You may get a good story out of it, but you also get respected
> anthropologists kicking the backs of theater chairs, squirming in their seats and, if they
> weren't a professor emerita at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, maybe
> even throwing popcorn at the screen.
>
> Retired professor Helen C. Rountree hasn't done any of those things. Yet.
> But when her friends finally drag her to a showing of "The New World," all bets
> are off.
>
> "They will probably be laughing themselves silly watching me instead of the
> movie," says Rountree, who lives in Hampton. "We're going to do a postmortem
> while I'm still fulminating."
>
> Rountree is an expert on Pocahontas and the world in which she lived. Her
> new book is "Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed
> by Jamestown."
>
> Scholars have penned enough nonfiction on Pocahontas to offer Malick plenty
> of material - fascinating stuff, too - for a compelling story grounded more
> firmly in fact.
>
> It makes you wonder how the Jamestown story might go if Pocahontas, Powhatan
> and his brother Opechancanough had $100 million to produce a film today.
>
> "The plot would be very different from what you see in the movies," Rountree
> assured me. "For one thing, the colonists would not be heroes who had a
> right to settle here. The Indians would not be treacherous, mindless villains."
>
> And Pocahontas? Not a Barbie, despite what Malick and Disney say. Scholars
> like Rountree were quick to point that out 10 years ago, when the House of
> Mouse charged its animators to come up with the sexiest Indian maiden ever.
>
> The real Pocahontas, we were reminded then, was only about 11 when she met
> Capt. John Smith. Built like a piano mover, as Rountree told a Daily Press
> reporter. And nekkid, too.
>
> "The kids were doing very active labor alongside their parents, and some of
> that was quite dirty," she explained Tuesday. "The easiest way to clean a kid
> is if they don't have clothes. Ditto for hair."
>
>
> Yes, that's right: Pocahontas had a nekkid head, too. Shaved to the skull
> except for the rat-tail trailing down her back.
>
> If Capt. Smith was ever drawn to a kid like that, Malick would be making a
> completely different movie. And then he'd be arrested.
>
> Eventually, Pocahontas hit puberty, married a fellow Indian, then got
> kidnapped by white settlers to trade back to her father in exchange for white
> captives. The settlers ended up keeping Pocahontas, turning her over to a
> Calvinist minister for schooling.
>
> To the whites, she was a pagan soul to save, as well as a bargaining chip.
> To Rountree, she was being "brainwashed."
>
> "Held captive, literally," she says. "Probably under house arrest for some
> time."
>
> Eventually, Pocahontas married tobacco entrepreneur John Rolfe, who, if
> we're talking realism, should be known today as the father of lung cancer. Was it
> love?
>
> To Rountree, Rolfe was "in lust," obviously drawn to Pocahontas, as his
> letters indicate. As for Pocahontas, Rountree considers it less love or lust than
> a psychological disorder - Stockholm Syndrome, where captives emotionally
> attach themselves to their captors.
>
> Pocahontas and Rolfe soon sailed to visit England with their infant son. She
> died there and was buried at Gravesend in southeast England. Rountree
> reckons she has tens of thousands of descendants alive today, many of whom probably
> don't even know their ancestry.
>
> Every now and then, people like Wayne Newton - who claims Cherokee and
> Powhatan blood - make noises about bringing Pocahontas' remains back to Virginia.
> But in the 1920s, Rountree says, a respected anthropologist excavated the
> mass grave where Pocahontas is said to rest, looking for a telltale skull of a
> Native American. He didn't find one.
>
> Virginia Indians today have "very mixed feelings about her," Rountree says.
> "It's not simple. With some of the older folks, they will believe the myth
> because it was the myth that kept them going for a long time - one Indian who
> was acceptable to the whites."
>
> In the movie the Indians would make about Jamestown, Rountree says,
> Pocahontas would be a footnote. "She wasn't crucial, sorry," she says.
>
> Powhatan and his brother would be the "good cop/bad cop" of the New World,
> alternately assaulting and befriending the invading Europeans until they, too,
> perished, their territory and power diminishing.
>
> And John Smith would be the rascal who years later rewrote his own story -
> and history along with it. Pocahontas throwing herself between him and her
> father's bloodthirsty warriors. The Indian falling for the noble white man.
>
> "He had taken care to associate himself with Pocahontas already," Rountree
> says. "So he was attaching himself to somebody he was hoping would be a
> celebrity. It didn't happen till long after he was dead. Also, it made a good story
> - falling in love with the enemy.
>
> "He was not the kind of journalist we think of today. He was a storyteller."
>
> Hollywood would've loved him.
>
> Tamara Dietrich can be reached at [log in to unmask] or at 247-7892.
>
> Copyright (c) 2006, Daily Press
>


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