that was part of my point. If you hold the people of the past to modern standards, you’ll have to cancel the great leaders of non-European cultures as well. I discuss this further here.
The story of Pocahontas is complicated. I saw a member of Pocahontas’ tribe give a talk at my university. She said that according to their oral tradition, Pocahontas actually married John Rolfe at the command of the tribal leader, who wanted her to spy on the English. The tribal leader, incidentally, was a woman not a man. The entire incident in which Pocahontas supposedly rescued John Smith was actually a ceremony in which Smith was officially made a member of the tribe. because no one at the ceremony spoke any English, Smith misinterpreted the whole incident. The man who “rescued” Smith was actually the tribe’s shaman, not the chief, and not Pocahontas‘s father. Their tribe is matriarchal, with women as political leaders and men as spiritual leaders.
