Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future

by Patty Krawec

The story of Pocahontas is familiar, but the familiar story couldn’t be farther from the truth. It is told as a love story when it is actually the story of an abduction. She is, perhaps, our first Missing Sister. Her name was Metoaka—Pocahontas was a nickname—and she was the daughter of a Wampanoag chief. Metoaka was twelve when she met John Smith, and she may indeed have saved his life. But it was John Rolfe she eventually married, years after she had been kidnapped by the English and held by them for a year. Recounting this story in The Baptism of Early Virginia, historian Rebecca Anne Goetz writes that, at the time of her kidnapping, Metoaka was married to one of her own people. The sea captain who kidnapped her demanded a ransom, which her father did not pay. (Perhaps he did not “negotiate with terrorists.”) After more than a year of captivity, Metoaka converted to Christianity and took the name Rebecca. She agreed to marry Rolfe, and they moved to London, where she is buried.