The historical account of Pocahontas is predominantly that gathered from the journals of John Smith and other English colonialists, i.e. written accounts of history. For years, the Powhatan side of the Pocahontas story, maintained through oral histories, has only existed (and rather intentionally so) outside of the publishing world. Given history writers’ bias toward written information over oral, the master narrative of Pocahontas is that of an erased Powhatan perspective.

The work of Dr. Linwood "Little Bear" Custalow and Angela L. Daniel “Silver Star” in this book, then, is groundbreaking. Dr. Linwood "Little Bear" Custalow is the historian of the Mattaponi Indian tribe and has spent his life learning his tribe’s oral history. In The True Story of Pocahontas, he works with Angela L. Daniel “Silver Star” to transcribe the oral history of Pocahontas into print.

This book is not written for children, but the reading difficulty is very approachable for middle-grade. Further, it is the only account of a Powhatan perspective of the Pocahontas story as passed down through the oral tradition. This work offers a key counter to the Euro-centric, writing-biased Pocahontas master narrative, in addition to key counter narratives about particular details of Pocahontas’ life.

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