What Pocahontas in the Rotunda reveals about American Democracy
It’s 12pm and a sunny Autumn Day in Washington D.C. Emerging from the sky is the impressive edifice of the US Capitol, a symbol of unparalleled power, the world’s first modern republic. Within its chambers, bills get tabled, revised, debated, and enacted into law.
As tourists strain to get a glimpse into the internal chambers of power, we shuffle through the gilded entrance hall, into a cinema room which briefly gives a fired-up patriotic spiel of American values. It briefly mentions Native Americans and slavery, but its embrace of the ideals of the great American republic is almost akin to something you would expect from a Maoist political campaign.
As we tour the space, ‘that’s where Lincoln sat in the House,’ the important function of art is glaringly obvious. The tour guide is keen to point out that each statue is voted through by the House after the states’ select their famous representative.
However, by far the most impressive and prized installations are the paintings which line the walls of the Capitol’s rotunda and provide the atmospheric backdrop for presidents cast in bronze. As our tour guide informs us, each of the commissioned paintings represent a pivotal moment in the creation of the American republic. Amongst the paintings is the ubiquitous face of George Washington resigning his commission, and the earnest expressions uniformly printed on each founding father as they sign the Declaration of Independence.
One painting is quickly summarised by the guide: this ‘…portrays the baptism of Pocahontas…painted in 1840 by John Gadsby Chapman…’. As our glazed eyes sweep across to register the painting, two bright figures command attention.
One of the figures, a woman draped in a white gown which sweeps the floor, kneels before a minister whose left hand is raised as he addresses the crowd whilst his right-hand graces the baptismal font. The crowd wait with bated breath for the woman to be anointed with the holy water. Whilst Pocahontas’ brother, Nantequaus, turns away from the ceremony, her uncle Opachisco leans in from the right. These displays of mixed emotions and her stature in submission to the minister eerily allude to the historical undertones of the painting.
The Baptism of Pocahontas depicts the daughter of the influential Algonkian chief of Powhatan as she is baptised in the Anglican church and given the name Rebecca. This event took place in 1613 or 1614 in Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in North America. Her baptism and subsequent marriage to John Rolfe helped to secure a peaceful settlement between the colonists and Tidewater tribes.
Pocahontas was the first Native American to convert to Christianity in the English colonies. The baptism ceremony therefore represents a milestone in the settler mission which sought to establish Christianity to bind more tightly the emerging English colonies.
The painting also evokes childhood memories of watching the Disney film Pocahontas and its romantic tale of a forbidden love between the coloniser and the colonised. Critics have since grimaced at the films’ implicit rejection of a brutal underlying history which saw the systematic extermination and displacement of Native American people from the Eastern frontier. Moreover, it ignored the very real consequences for Pocahontas, who was only eleven when she met Rolfe, and died from smallpox at age twenty-one in England.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the programme of ethnic cleansing and Native removal gained momentum and reared its head in American policies such as the 1830 Indian Removal Act. This act saw the forcible displacement of 60,000 Native Americans from the eastern frontier onto reservations in what would be known as the Trail of Tears. These reservations were formally recognised in treaties such as Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 (which assigned the Sioux the Black Hills of Dakota). The Colorado Gold Rush saw an escalation of settler-Indian violence which resulted in the wars of the 1860s and 1870s. The Treaty of Medicine Lodge and the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie further squeezed the territories assigned to Indian tribes and made them dependent on American government food and medical supplies. Throughout the 1880s, the systematic policy to exterminate the buffalo population accelerated Indian dependence on US government aid. The surrender of the Sioux in battles against General Custer would eventually lead to the 1885 opening of Native American territory to white settlers, culminating in the 1889 Oklahoma Land Rush.
This historical context reminds us that despite presentations of harmony and coexistence, white European settlers won a bloody and sure victory in the battle for America, conquering Indian land and removing any traces of their way of life.
Indeed, as our eyes moved to paintings depicting the founding of America, one could not help but notice the absence of Native Americans. ‘The Baptism of Pocahontas’ and its placement in the US Capitol Rotunda serves as an important albeit unintentional reminder of the systematic erasure of Native Americans from the fabric of the republic.
By Sofia Aujla-Jones
