As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Affiliate disclosure.
Historical person
Powhatan, also known as Wahunsenacawh, was the paramount chief of a powerful alliance of Algonquian-speaking communities in tidewater Virginia. He confronted the arrival and expansion of the English settlement at Jamestown from 1607.
His diplomacy alternated between trade, coercion and warfare as both sides struggled over food, territory and authority. As the father of Pocahontas, he became central to later narratives about the early Virginia colony, many of which simplify the political complexity of the Powhatan world.
In William T. Vollmann’s Argall, English colonists establish Jamestown within the territory of the Powhatan paramount chiefdom and quickly become dependent on the communities they also intend to dominate. In Angela Hunt’s Jamestown, English hunger and faction, Powhatan diplomacy and violence, and the different identities formed by years apart have changed each survivor.
Series
The Keepers of the Ring is a multigenerational saga of English colonisation and Indigenous survival in North America. Beginning with Roanoke and continuing through Jamestown, the Pequot War, King Philip’s War and the growth of Charles Towne, the series follows a mixed family whose heirloom ring carries memory…
All books in this series
Seven Dreams is William T. Vollmann’s projected seven-volume cycle about the collisions between Indigenous peoples and European colonisers in North America. The published novels range from Norse voyages to Greenland and Vinland through the Jesuit missions of New France, the founding of Jamestown, the Nez Perce War and…
All books in this series
