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  • Malintzin, Pocahontas, and Krotoa: Indigenous Women and Myth Models of the Atlantic World
  • Pamela Scully

Narratives of heterosexuality permeate the history and dominant historiography of European exploration and conquest in the early modern period.1 One tale involves the hyper-sexuality of indigenous women and seems to be applicable to the discovery and exploration literature of much of the early modern era. The overly sexualized native woman surfaces in the sources of European exploration in places as diverse as North America, the South Pacific, East Indies and West Africa.2 Another account that is acknowledged in its distinctiveness, but not in its generality, pervades in particular the founding histories of settler societies bordering on the Atlantic World. Well-known conquistadors, settlers and governors such as Hernando Cortes, John Smith, Jan van Riebeeck—the first governor of the Cape Colony —and the many other European men engaged in exploration and settlement wrote of their first interactions with indigenous societies in part through the prism of an encounter with a helpful young native woman.

Ganananth Obeyesekere, in his argument with Marshall Sahlins over Hawaiian’s first perceptions of Captain Cook, argued convincingly that Europeans, since at least the time of Cortes, believed a cultural truth: that indigenous people on encountering a European (man) for the first time, were highly likely to perceive the European as a god.3 While Sahlins probably won the debate with specific regard to Cook’s experiences, Obeyesekere’s insight into the European imaginary has provoked broader questions about the European historical narratives of conquest.4 The story of European men enjoying the bodies and services of a special local young woman might also be understood as a “myth model” of the Atlantic World.5

If the body of the indigenous woman has been pressed into the service of history, why is this so? The role of women like Pocahontas, Malintzin, and Krotoa arose in part from the dynamics of the local societies in which they were living at the time of their encounters. Their relatively noble status (although complicated by personal misfortune in the case of Dona Marina and Krotoa), gender, and the ideological understandings of femininity in their local societies created the conditions for particular kinds of interactions with powerful strangers. That is, the specific political economy of each local community helped facilitate a heterosexual dynamic with European men in the early years of the encounter. One could also argue that this story of the native woman and European man was perhaps produced out of a kind of referent between conquistadors, explorers, and governors who were reading earlier literature.6 For example, Hamlin argues that John Smith bought into the notion of European as god. Smith also, it appears was inspired by Cortes’s narrative of his almost “single-handed” conquest of Mexico sufficient to hope for similar glory and masculine adventure. In his writings, most penned long after the event, and in the case of Pocahontas, probably fabricated, John Smith “never failed to mention that at each critical juncture a beautiful young woman has fallen in love with him and interceded on his behalf” whether in Virginia, Turkey or France.7

In her landmark article “Conquering Discourses of ‘Sexual Conquest’” Powers argues for the need to attend to the language of history and of historiography as we attempt to write a more nuanced history of the era of conquest. I heed Powers’ skepticism of the conquest narratives of the “Spanish man as…sexual conqueror” and the “Indian/ casta woman as always already mistress…”8Hitherto, scholars interested in gender have analyzed the era of discovery primarily through a discursive lens focusing on how European men imagined the lands and people they came upon. A rich literature reveals how explorers and travelers rendered the Americas through a gendered and sexualized reading that saw the land as a woman, often as a passive indigenous woman, therefore open to the embrace and penetration of Europe.9 The literature has shown how we might understand the dominance of European colonialism, of the centrality of the white male, and the subjugation of the indigenous society through gender and sexuality.

We have yet to fully examine the ways in which the...

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