Mirrored lives : the impact of two indigenous women on European narratives of colonization and conquest of the Americas / by Jillian L. Bergin.

European conquest and colonization in the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would have utterly failed without Indigenous aid to the Europeans. Malinche was a former Aztec slave turned translator for Hernan Cortés, the infamous Spanish conquistador, from 1519-1529. Pocahontas was a young Algonquin woman married to John Rolfe and critical to the survival of the Jamestown settlement in the 1610s. Both women were baptized into the Christian faith and gave birth to sons, but how these women have been memorialized is drastically different. Malinche is viewed as a traitor to her people for assisting Cortés and the Spaniards in their conquest while Pocahontas is idealized as an “Indian Princess” and the prime example of spreading English civility. To examine how these two women were conceptualized and understood by their European counterpart, letters, fictional works of the time, and iconography are heavily relied upon in this thesis.