The dark history of Pocahontas, whose name Trump keeps evoking in order to slam Elizabeth Warren
• US President Donald Trump has repeatedly used the name "Pocahontas" to bash Senator Elizabeth Warren.
• He recently referred to the senator as "Pocahontas" at an event meant to honor surviving Native American code talkers, Business Insider reported.
• "Pocahontas" was the nickname of a teenaged girl abducted by English colonists in 1613 who died around the age of 21.
US President Donald Trump referred to Senator Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas" during an event honoring Native American code-talkers Monday, Business Insider reported.
"We have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her 'Pocahontas.' But you know what, I like you, because you are special. You are special people. You are really incredible people," Trump said to the three elderly WWII vets at the event.
It's not the first time Trump has used the name to bash Warren.
The controversial rhetoric links back to the fact Warren's Republican opponent Scott Brown "accused her of faking her Native American ancestry after reports surfaced that she listed herself as a minority in a directory of law school professors," Business Insider's Jeremy Berke reported.
But even before Trump began using her name as an insult, Pocahontas has occupied a prominent place in American pop culture.
But who was the real Pocahontas, and how did we come to be so fixated on her?
First of all, she wasn't actually named Pocahontas."Pocahontas" was actually a nickname, meaning something along the lines of "mischievous one." Colonist William Strachey chronicled how 11-year-old Pocahontas would visit the settlers' fort at Jamestown and turn cartwheels with the English children, according to "Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea: Indian Women as Cultural Intermediaries and National Symbols."
There's a reason why we remember Pocahontas, and not other members of her tribe and family. Her alleged interactions with English colonist John Smith played a major role in shaping her legacy.
In December 1607, Wahunsenaca's brother Opechancanough captured Smith while he was exploring the Chickahominy River. Smith later claimed that Pocahontas disrupted his execution, throwing her body across his to protect him. In a 1616 letter to Queen Anne, he even wrote "she hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine."
Numerous historians have pointed out the famous event likely did not happen as Smith described it - if it even happened at all. It wasn't the first time Smith had claimed to be saved by a young woman who intervened to protect him from their male relatives. In "Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma," Camilla Townsend writes Smith claimed a young Muslim woman had protected him in a similar fashion while he was enslaved in Turkey. What's more, Smith left the dramatic incident out of most of his early writings. He didn't even mention it until 1624.
Chief Roy Crazy Horse, the late leader of the Powhatan Renape Nation, wrote the alleged incident helped propel Pocahontas to lasting fame: "Of all of Powhatan's children, only 'Pocahontas' is known, primarily because she became the hero of Euro-Americans as the 'good Indian,' one who saved the life of a white man," he wrote.
Just a few years after she allegedly saved Smith, English captain Samuel Argall lured Pocahontas onto his ship and took her hostage during the First Anglo-Powhaten War. Indian Country Today reports that the Mattaponi tribe's oral history asserts she was raped in captivity, and that her abduction separated her from her first husband and daughter.
Ultimately she was converted to Christianity and baptized as Rebecca. She married settler John Rolfe on April 5, 1614. He had lost his wife Sarah after some of the English colonists were shipwrecked on Bermuda. The couple had one child together, a son named Thomas.
The marriage established what became known as "the Peace of Pocahontas" - a lull in the fighting between the English and the Powhaten. The cash-strapped Virginia Company hoped to establish the couple as a "symbol of peaceful relations" in London, according to Encyclopedia Virginia. So in 1616, Pocahontas, her husband, and her young son traveled to England for a publicity tour, on a ship captained by none other than Argall.
She would never return to Virginia.
In March 1617, the family boarded the ship that would take them back to North America. Pocahontas and Thomas were struck with a sudden illness as it sailed down the Thames; he survived, she did not.
Pocahontas, who was likely only about 21 years old, was buried in Gravesend. Rolfe and his son ultimately returned to Virginia. Rolfe died in 1622, possibly in an attack orchestrated by his second wife's uncle Opechancanough, according to "The Cultural Roots of the 1622 Indian Attack." In 1644, Thomas Rolfe joined the conflict against his mother's people, becoming a lieutenant for the English military.