A banner free, non-profit, educational site about Pocahontas.

​About the Pocahontas Lives! website

I am now a retired English teacher (since April 1, 2023). I was an associate professor in Japan specializing in Applied Linguistics. Unrelated to my academic specialty, but more or less as a hobby, I have read extensively about Pocahontas, Jamestown and the Powhatan Indians (books read) and have made notes and observations about things I've found in the writings of historians and anthropologists. As I was reading, I thought I should make a website to organize what I've learned and record it for myself and others. With the Pocahontas story, there are so many versions and so much misinformation that I thought a reliable website on the topic would be helpful to some people.

At Pocahontas Lives! I will present excerpts of writings by relevant authors, and also offer links, sources and original content that I hope provide additional insight. I will do my best to separate what we know about Pocahontas from speculation and myth.

For all things related to Jamestown, Virtual Jamestown is easily the best site. A Pocahontas website with some useful information is the Pocahontas Archive. 

I welcome corrections to any mistakes found and rebuttals to any questionable information readers may wish to address. Cheers.

NOTE; This website is a work in progress. I reckon it's only 80% complete as of Sept. 1, 2023.
IMHO, a few highlights on this site are the following:
  • Analysis of the 1616 Simon van de Passe engraving of Pocahontas
  • Article "Is the Sedgeford Hall Portrait Evidence of a Crime?" added Oct. 31, 2021
  • A potential revelation about the name Matoaka vs the presumed minor variation Matoaks
  • Slideshow video on YouTube - "What was the tribe of Pocahontas?"; added April 2020
  • List of every time John Smith mentioned Pocahontas in his writings
  • Side by side comparison of the two versions of John Rolfe's letter to Sir Thomas Dale asking permission to marry Pocahontas
  • Short 'reviews' of books about Pocahontas for adults and children
  • My paper on Linwood Custalow's The True Story of Pocahontas (spoiler: approach that book with great skepticism) 
  • Page on how John Smith did not actually claim to have been rescued by multiple women
  • My Beaver Page (in progress) on how the extermination of beaver affected the environment to the detriment of the natives

My site map has a list of all pages on this website.
Rick Tatnall's online course on Pocahontas called Pocahontas and the Virginia Indians (June 15 – August 23, 2020) is now finished for 2020. 

'Shout Out from Japan' video on YouTube - June 21, 2020
Summer 2019 Progress Report:

It's now July of 2019, and my classes have finished for the semester. I'll have a short summer, though, as I have to chaperon students to San Rafael, California from August 18.

I have more or less completed What was the relationship between Pocahontas and John Smith? I think the most worthwhile information here is the list of John Smith's mentions of Pocahontas in his writings in their order of publication. This is useful not only for understanding their relationship, but also for evaluating the legendary 'rescue'. My conclusions re. the question of a romance can be found by jumping to the bottom of the page. Someday I'll take on the task of streamlining this page, though, as it's somewhat of a mess.

Still unfinished is the Disney representation of Pocahontas page. I'm a bit paralyzed, as I can't verify the concept art of Glen Keane. I may have to delete some images, but I really want the early Pocahontas animation artwork there, and the images seem to me to be legit. I need more time on that.

The page on Pocahontas's relationship with John Rolfe still needs a lot of work. I have more pages in mind that I haven't even listed."  I'm still trying to get through the page on John Smith's overall credibility. The Notes in the Margins pages are obviously incomplete. I may be running out of steam on all these tasks I've set for myself.

Anyway, whoever discovers this site should know it's not a dead site, and I do still make updates from time to time, especially during spring and summer breaks.

July 27, 2019
A Digression ...
​
From The Undoing Project

In a digression from reading about Pocahontas and east coast Native Americans, I recently took up the popular 2017 behavioral economics book, The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball and The Big Short). It's about the working partnership of two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose work led to Kahneman receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics, In the book, there are some interesting observations about historians. One of these is that historians carry a "hindsight bias" whereby they are seldom able to predict what will happen, but once it has happened, they can explain the reasons why with great clarity.
"[An occupational hazard of historians is their] tendency to take whatever facts they had observed (neglecting the many facts they did not or could not observe) and make them fit neatly into a confident-sounding story:
All too often, we find ourselves unable to predict what will happen; yet after the fact we explain what did happen with a great deal of confidence. This 'ability' to explain that which we cannot predict, even in the absence of any additional information, represents an important, though subtle, flaw in our reasoning. It leads us to believe that there is a less uncertain world than there actually is, and that we are less bright than we actually might be. For if we can explain tomorrow what we can't predict today, without any added information except the knowledge of the actual outcome, then this outcome must have been determined in advance and we should have been able to predict it. The fact that we couldn't is taken as an indication of our limited intelligence rather than of the uncertainty that is in the world." [from Tversky in Lewis] p. 206, 207
...
"A false view of what has happened in the past makes it harder to see what might occur in the future. The historians in [Amos Tversky's] audience of course prided themselves on the 'ability' to construct, out of fragments of some past reality, explanatory narratives of events which made them seem, in retrospect, almost predictable.. The only question that remained, once the historian had explained how and why some event had occurred, was why the people in his narrative had not seen what the historian could now see." Lewis, p. 208
My comment:
When I first read this, it seemed sort of profound, but now as I analyze it more, I find it less so. I suppose Lewis is talking about experts who comment on current events, such as an election or international crisis where interpretations are made fairly quickly after an event has taken place.. Looking back at the 400-year-old Pocahontas story, I do see instances of historians constructing entire narratives out of scanty evidence, but they were obviously never in a position to make predictions about the events. And when I read the histories, I personally don't think of the stories as definitive, but more or less what the individual historian thinks is the most plausible explanation based on his or her accumulated expertise. Historians also benefit from having many sources after the fact that could not have been available to people making the decisions that became 'history'. I'm not sure what Tversky (and Lewis) are suggesting historians should do: maybe refrain from commenting at all about historical events when they don't possess every relevant detail?

Lewis also quotes Tversky as having said, "It is amazing how dull history books are, given how much of what's in them must be invented." (p. 206), which is interesting. But when Lewis says "historians ... left [Tversky's presentation] ashen-faced" I have to laugh. That almost certainly happened only in someone's imagination.
Banner photo by Hadley-Ives