You would think that after writing 337 #stampoftheday posts, that a stamp could no longer surprise me. While you’d usually be right. Today you are wrong.

The stamp that surprised me is a 5-cent stamp, issued in May 1907, that portrays Pocahontas, who died on March 21, 1617. It was one of three issued in conjunction with Jamestown Exposition, a world’s fair the celebrated the 300th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in North America.

Several aspects of the stamp surprised me. First, I totally overlooked it just 10 days ago when I wrote about the sad ways that Native Americans had been portrayed on US stamps and wrote that while Native Americans appeared in scenes on stamps issued in 1893 and 1898, it wasn’t until 1923 that a Native American was sole focus of a US postage stamp.

I was wrong. Pocahontas had been pictured on a stamp issued 16 years earlier. In fact, she was just the third women to be portrayed on a US postage stamp, preceded only by Queen Isabella of Spain and Martha Washington.

That leads to the second surprise. I didn’t notice Pocahontas because she isn’t portrayed in native garb. Rather, she is portrayed in the outfit of an upper-class Englishwoman. That’s because in the English settlers took Pocahontas, who by the time had married settler John Rolfe and had a son, back to England, supposedly to show how they could get Native Americans to convert to Christianity. In March 1617, she and her family boarded a ship to return to America. However, on the journey up the Thames, she took ill. She was brought ashore at Gravesend and died shortly after that. Hence the English dress.

Of course I knew that Pocahontas is one of the most well-known as puzzling figures in American lore. As Gregory Smithers, a history professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, wrote in The Atlantic on the 400th anniversary of her death, “despite the brevity of her life and the mystery surrounding the cause of her death, Pocahontas remains one of the most recognizable Native icons in American culture today.”

In addition to two silent films, for example, she was the subject of 1953 movie, two Disney movies (in 1995 and 1998), and a 2005 movie directed by Terrence Malick, as well as 1994 Japanese animated production, a 1995 Canadian movie, and a 2016 docudrama produced by the Christian Broadcasting Network. She’s also been the subject of several pieces of art, a ballet by Elliot Carter, and a 1963 musical. And, of course, her name is so ubiquitous that it was Donald Trump’s preferred nickname for Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has ancestors who were Native Americans.

The story shown in the movies, that I grew up with centers on the fact that Pocahontas saved the life of John Smith, the settlers’ leader who was about to be killed by her father, Powhatan, chief of the Native Americans in the area. The source of this account was a letter Smith sent to Queen Anne of Denmark in 1816, just before Pocahontas headed to England. Smith expanded on the tale in his 1624 history of the colony, claiming that after he was captured “two great stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many as could layd hands on him [Smith], dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs, to beate out his braines, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death.”

There’s a small problem with this story. The incident supposedly occurred in 1607 and Smith doesn’t say a word about it in his 1608 reports on his first year in the New World, an account that includes both his capture by the Native Americans and his talks with Powhatan. Most historians believe Smith created the story out of whole cloth, in part to make Pocahontas a heroine worthy of an audience with Queen Anne. Others, however, contend that Smith omitted it from his earlier accounts because the colony’s financial backers had stipulated that no one was “to write any letter of anything that might discourage others,” such as the fact that some Native Americans didn’t welcome the settlers.

While Pocahontas did befriend Smith and others in the colony, I also was surprised to learn that a few years later Pocahontas was kidnapped during a war between the settlers and that while she was being held, she supposedly converted to Christianity, married Rolfe, and bore a son. Even more surprising is while this is the conventional history it may not be true, according to Smithers who notes that while she married and had a son “there’s no archival evidence that she ever converted to Christianity or was baptized.”

All of this leads me not to a surprise but to a different kind of thinking about why the Pocahontas story has had been so powerful and long-lasting. Smithers argues “these early 17th-century descriptions of the young Pamunkey woman established a cultural template for European and white American representations of Native Americans. Whether Pocahontas, or Lewis and Clark’s faithful guide Sacagawea, or the quintessential sidekick Tonto, indigenous people have appeared in a variety of cultural productions as mere props in the larger drama of colonialism in North America.” (Smithers, it bears mention, has particularly harsh words for the Disney movies which, he claims feature “a glib rewriting of a much more complicated reality, notably transforming a child who would have been between 9 and 12 years of age into a Barbie-like object of sexual desire.”)

In a similar vein, Edward Gallagher, an English professor at Lehigh, who devotes a whole section to Pocahontas on his “History on Trial,” website, asks “who is she, and why is she so familiar? To Paula Gunn Allen, one of her latest biographers, Pocahontas is medicine woman, spy, entrepreneur, and diplomat. To the previous generation’s Charles Larson, she’s “Every Indian, the archetypal Noble Savage.”…She’s been glorified as the “the first lady of Virginia,” “Our Lady of the James,” “the Virgin Queen of the West,” “a daughter of Eve,” “an angel of peace,” “the Indian Ceres,” and, most tellingly, “the mother of us all.”

“In truth,” he adds, “she’s been all things to all people.”

Like I said, it takes a lot to surprise me 11 months into #stampoftheday exploration. I wonder if there are a few more surprises in store before I likely end this project in mid-April, when I will have done it for a year.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.