The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture

Abstract

only to the Great Spirit of the savages and to his own good deeds (p. 439). But the Indian's use of the providential the ory is intended to exonerate the white settlers, not to inform us of his religious beliefs. And in the construct of historical foreordination the end was already appointed from the begin ning of time, so that the means to the end will appear as noth ing when compared with the force of God's will. By explaining his own and his nation's extinction with a providential interpretation of history, Chingachgook relieves the settlers (and presumably the nineteenth-century reader) of moral responsibility. He offers the fiction that he is not the victim of evil deeds, and that the settlers are not the perpe trators of high crimes. Rather, both are the tools of historical necessity. As Chingachgook nears death, Leatherstocking leaps out of nowhere to lead his young friends, Oliver and Elizabeth, to safety. In a significant act, Natty then lifts the dying to his back, making graphic the psychological theme that has undergirded the novel?the is the white man's burden (p. 432). Chingachgook and all that he embodies dies, mak ing it possible for the settlers to permit Mohegan to live on. But pathetically, time is already working upon memory, for in engraving the Indian's tombstone the names Chingach gook and Mohican are misspelled, leaving to history only Mohegan, Indian John (p. 472).

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