When I was little, my grandmother told me that we were descendants of Pocahontas. The idea sparked my fantasies. Having Indian blood was a special blessing. He endowed me with certain spiritual qualities, psychic perception and magical abilities, in my imagination. I was later disappointed to learn that it was fashionable among past generations to claim a blood relationship with Pocahontas. I suspected that my grandmother’s story had this origin.
Much later I realized that the fascination with Native American things was a symptom of a certain affinity. I valued Indian fantasy as a call of the wild from within. It had 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.
Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat (HarperSanFrancisco), by Paula Gunn Allen, Ph.D., tells a completely different story of this American icon than the one we appreciate. This award-winning author, a retired UCLA professor credited with the original literary studies of Native Americans, has taken the usual sources, as well as those that are rarely referenced, and reinterpreted the data within the context of the mythical worldview. of the native Americans. The result is a riveting account of the transformation of “Turtle Island” into “America the Beautiful.”
Dr. Gunn Allen begins by explaining the spirit-centered worldview of Native Americans at the time. The “manito aki”, belonging to the supernatural, paranormal world inhabited by spirits, was the waking reality of the Native Americans, more real to them than the physical world.
We could say that they were good “Jungians” at the time, because they respected the experiences of the imagination as real and worthy of attention. The natives at that time also realized that their world was coming to an end. Their calendars and mythologies had prepared them. The coming of the white men was part of the fulfillment of this prophecy.
The evidence points to the fact that Pocahontas was a high priestess, initiated into the mysteries of the spirit world and charged with the responsibility of these spirits. Based on her evidence, the author came to the initial conclusion that Pocahontas, instead of falling in love with Captain John Smith, was actually on a pre-planned mission preying on him as an unwitting pawn. His goal: to ensure that the spirit of tobacco would find a home in the new world. The spirit of tobacco, the essential shamanic power of the Native American world, needed to find a way to be part of the materialistic world that was being born. This mission was crucial for the spirit of the native world to survive the destruction of its manifest existence.
Pocahontas was the channel through which the transfer of power was achieved. Pocahontas’s connection to John Smith was the means by which native spirituality was preserved, though it would have to hide for centuries within a plant to be traded, traded, consumed, and vilified within a purely materialistic consciousness, until such time as This ancient spirituality could one day be reborn in the consciousness of the European mindset, as is beginning to happen today.
What is this new emerging mindset? Gunn Allen writes: “…the construction of Pocahontas in American thought, while often historically inaccurate, is an indication that the American imagination is as connected to the aki hand as it is to the earth. Americans by harmonizing our modern American consciousness with the ancient psyche of the earth we inhabit is the mastery of a paradigm that assumes material, measurable existence is all there is.”
The lesson for us is to respect the intuitive nature of Timagination. We need to experience and understand the imagination as a channel of intuitive realities. The mind and its ambassador, the imagination, is quite real although it inhabits a different plane of existence than the world recognized by the senses. It’s real because it makes a difference in our lives. It is in this realm of imagination that we can find our highest ideals, intuit our interconnectedness as spiritual beings, meet nonmaterial beings, and discover the patterns in the creative forces that shape our lives. Our fascination with all things Native American is evidence of our connection to this non-material world. However, this connection is something that unfortunately we do not recognize within ourselves, but instead project onto these indigenous peoples. Gunn Allen reconnects us with our heritage. She joins us in gratitude to the people who came before us, who built a spiritual time capsule that would survive the materialistic and destructive stage of our history, preserving for the future our endowment as children of the spirit. Pocahontas is truly the godmother of America.