Book Review - Pocahontas - Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat
When I was a little boy, my grandmother told me that we were descendants of Pocahontas. The idea aroused my fantasies. Having Indian blood was a special blessing. It endowed me with certain spiritual qualities, psychic perceptiveness and magical abilities - in my imagination. Later I was disappointed to learn that it was fashionable among past generations to claim a blood tie to Pocahontas. I suspected my grandmother's story was of this origin. ok Much later I realized that a fascination with things Native American was a symptom of a certain affinity. I valued the Indian fantasy as a call of the wild from within. It was to be answered, but in my own, indigenous terms, not in terms borrowed from other cultures. I recently read a book that has added great depth to this perspective. playground Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat (HarperSanFrancisco), by Paula Gunn Allen, Ph.D., tells an entirely different history of this American icon from the one we cherish. This...