HELEN ROUNTREE, NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE SPECIALIST
TCC to host her talk on new book about Pocahontas; panel
to discuss Indian myths and reality
~This talk, part of TCC’s American
History Lecture Series, concludes with a book signing~
NORFOLK,
Va. – (Feb. 21, 2005) – Pocahontas – a larger-than-life
Indian princess, a cultural misfit in the New World era, or some
of both?
Tidewater Community College invites the public to an informative,
free talk by Native American expert Helen Clark Rountree at 7
p.m. on March 21 in the TCC Jeanne and George Roper Performing
Arts Center in Norfolk. She will talk about her new book, Pocahontas,
Powhatan, Opechancanoug: 3 Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown.
A panel of Native Americans and cultural experts will set the
stage for Rountree’s talk. Kicking off the evening, they
will discuss “Living With the Pocahontas Legend: The Anthropologist
and the Indians.”
Rountree, a nationally acclaimed specialist in the study of North
American Indian culture, has conducted in-depth research and fieldwork
for three decades. Her work resulted in considerable insight on
the Powhatan Indians and other tribes that inhabited eastern Virginia
and the East Coast from the early 1600s to present day.
Prior to Disney’s animated film Pocahontas in 1995, Rountree
was known primarily among fellow scholars. After the movie, she
became a media expert due to her fieldwork with Virginia’s
Powhatan and the Western Shoshone Native American tribes.
Pocahontas may be the most famous Native American who ever lived,
but during the settlement of Jamestown and for two centuries afterward,
the great chiefs Powhatan and Opechancanough were the subjects
of considerably more interest and historical documentation than
the young woman. Rountree discusses this in addition to many other
facets of early Native American life in her newest book.
Rountree received a 1995 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State
Council of Higher Education. With the award money, Rountree published
a children’s book later that year, Young Pocahontas in the
Indian World, to set the record straight as a response to the
Disney movie. She retired from Old Dominion University in 2000
after teaching for 31 years.
Rountree’s extensive list of publications includes four
academic books about Virginia Indians. She also was a consultant
on Algonquians of the East Coast, part of a Time-Life Books series
on American Indian tribes and was a regional consultant for the
first episode of PBS’s Land of the Eagles series on the
Mid-Atlantic region.
TCC’s American History Lecture Series is part of the American
History Teacher-Scholars program, a three-year Department of Education
grant project. The grant partners TCC with Portsmouth and Norfolk
public schools to train teachers and improve SOL scores by teaching
history through a local lens. For more information on the grant
project, visit
www.exploretidewaterhistory.com.
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Laurie White |
Media Relations |
757-822-1085 |
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Tidewater Community College
is the second largest of the 23 community colleges in the Commonwealth
of Virginia, enrolling more than 35,000 students annually. The 37th
largest in the nation’s 1,600 community-college network, TCC
ranks among the 50 fastest-growing large community colleges. Founded
in 1968 as a part of the Virginia Community College System, the
college serves the South Hampton Roads region with campuses in Chesapeake,
Norfolk, Portsmouth and Virginia Beach as well as the TCC Jeanne
and George Roper Performing Arts Center in the theater district
in downtown Norfolk, the Visual Arts Center in Olde Towne Portsmouth
and a regional Advanced Technology Center in Virginia Beach. Forty-four
percent of the region’s residents attending a college or university
in Virginia last fall were enrolled at TCC. For more information,
visit www.tcc.edu
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