Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma: The American Portraits Series

Camilla Townsend's stunning new book, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, differs from all previous biographies of Pocahontas in capturing how similar seventeenth century Native Americans were--in the way they saw, understood, & struggled to control their world---not only to the invading British but to ourselves. Neither naïve nor innocent, Indians like Pocahontas & her father, the powerful king Powhatan, confronted the vast might of the English with sophistication, diplomacy, & violence.    
Indeed, Pocahontas's life is a testament to the subtle intelligence that Native Americans, always aware of their material disadvantages, brought against the military power of the colonizing English. Resistance, espionage, collaboration, deception: Pocahontas's life is here shown as a road map to Native American strategies of defiance exercised in the face of overwhelming odds & in the hope for a semblance of independence worth the name.    
Townsend's Pocahontas emerges--as a young child on the banks of the Chesapeake, an influential noblewoman visiting a struggling Jamestown, an English gentlewoman in London--for the first time in three-dimensions; allowing us to see & sympathize with her people as never before.