Paula Gunn Allen Critical Essay | Critical Review by Publishers Weekly

Critical Review by Publishers Weekly

SOURCE: Review of Pocahontas, by Paula Allen Gunn. Publishers Weekly 250, no. 35 (1 September 2003): 76.

In the following review, the critic offers a favorable assessment of Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat.

In what is presented as the first study of its kind by an American Indian scholar, Allen (The Sacred Hoop) offers a corrective to the romantic story of Pocahontas told initially by Capt. John Smith of the Virginia Company and most recently by Disney Studios. Euro-American historical accounts of Pocahontas's brief life, asserts Allen, typically depict her as lovelorn and tragic character (she died in 1617 in the aptly named river port of Gravesend, England, at the age of 20 or 21). Allen's Pocahontas [in Pocahontas], by contrast, is a real visionary, a prodigiously gifted young woman fervently devoted to the spiritual traditions of her people: a loose-knit group of Algonquin tribes known as the Powhatan...
(read more)