Rountree Helen C. Pocahontas's People. The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries

Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990. — xii, 404 p. — (The Civilization of the American Indian Series; no. 196). — ISBN 0-8061-2280-3.In this history, Helen C. Rountree traces events that shaped the lives of the Powhatan Indians of Virginia, from their first encounter with English colonists, in 1607, to their present-day way of life and relationship to the state of Virginia and the federal government.
Rountree’s examination of those four bundled years misses not a beat in the pulse of Powhatan life. Combining meticulous scholarship and sensitivity, the author explores the diversity always found among Powhatan people, and those people’s relationships with the English, the government of the fledgling United States, the Union and the Confederacy, the U.S. Census Bureau, white supremacists, the U.S. Selective Service, and the civil rights movement. In doing so, she brings the reader through the travails and near demise of the Powhatans to an understanding of how they have survived as Indians in Virginia. Social, eco nomic, political, and ritual life are examined as they evolved over the post-contact years. To this examination Rountree brings objective scholarship and a first-hand knowledge of the modern Powhatans.
Without stinting on documentation past and present, she shares her vision of the sweep of Powhatan history—and does so in prose at once lucid, plainspoken, and professionally fastidious. Her contribution to contemporary understanding of Indian history and culture is a signal landmark for scholars and general readers alike.Volume 196 in The Civilization of the American Indian Series.Helen C. Rountree is an ethnohistorian with anthropology degrees from the College of William and Mary, the University of Utah, and the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. The author of The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture, also published by the University of Oklahoma Press, she is associate professor of anthropology in Old Dominion University.