Pocahontas : Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat

Rating:
Summary: Generic and structural problems
Review: I admire what Gunn-Allen tries to do in this work: to place Pocahontas within her Native context. Gunn-Allen has been a much-needed voice for the "background" of history, questioning the reader's engrained privileging of the foreground, but it doesn't work in the genre "nonfiction biography." That's perhaps more marketing's error than the author's, but I also found the treatment of Native culture to be occasionally reductionist. Surely not every tribal myth translated across tribal lines? To read Pocahontas' (Pamunkey) spiritual journey as a Laguna Pueblo myth, while suggestive, treats Native mythology as monolithic. Granted, Gunn-Allen does add many disclaimers distancing one from the other, but the myth's very placement at the head of the first chapter is misleading. Such structural difficulties persist throughout the work. The lack of clear proof for many of Gunn-Allen's readings also deterred me. Again, even if Native culture lived/lives outside such Western empirical structures as proof, the lack thereof is still off-putting in a work of "nonfiction." As the reviewer before suggested, "mythic narrative" is closer to the mark for this work.

If only we had more primary source material regarding Pocahontas! There may just not be enough existent for a full-length biography.

Rating:
Summary: Shaky grasp of the facts
Review: I hope her knowledge of American Indian culture is sounder than her grasp of English history. I spotted some howlers, several repeated in the text: King James "VII" of Scotland (make that James VI) was NOT Queen Elizabeth's nephew. Nor was Queen Elizabeth England's first Protestant monarch in England (the honours go to her brother Edward VI)
I could go on, but you get the idea ... Read this one with a heaping tablespoonful of salt

Rating:
Summary: An Incoherent Work
Review: This is a poorly written book that poses as a "history." What Gunn-Allen does is to take historical facts and mold them to her interpretation, taking a set of unproven and uncorroborated assumptions and building an elaborate case upon them. The writing is incoherent and, at times, illogical and should remain in the category of "myth narrative." While it offers some interesting historical and cultural insights, it does little to advance an understanding of Pocahontas, the individual, as much as it does to serve whatever agenda Gunn-Allen is promoting.