The Baptism of Pocahontas by John Gadsby Chapman

imaged from: https://www.aoc.gov/explore-capitol-campus/art/baptism-pocahontas#:~:text=Chapman%20received%20the%20commission%20for,depicted%20rescue%20of%20John%20Smith.

The Baptism of Pocahontas

by John Gadsby Chapman 

Oil painting on canvas

12ft by 18ft 

1840

This huge piece was commissioned for the United State's Capitol Rontunda "scenes of early exploration" added between 1840 and 1855. Other works included are: 

Screenshot from: https://www.aoc.gov/explore-capitol-campus/buildings-grounds/capitol-building/rotunda

I read the image of Pocahontas' baptism as a text of internal colonization, religious and colonial hegemony or domination. I remember Michel du Certeau's critique of the drawing America by Jan van der Straet: 

Image credit: http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth200/amerigovespucci_text.html

"Before him is the Indian "America," a nude woman reclining in her hammock, an unnamed presence of difference, a body which awakens within a space of exotic fauna and flora. An inaugural scene: after a moment of stupor, on this threshold dotted with colonnades of trees, the conqueror will write the body of the other and trace there his own history. From her he will make a historied body --a blazon-- of his labors and phantasms. She will be "Latin" America."

Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, pp. xxv-xxvi

America, was drawn three hundred 270 years prior to Pocahonta's baptism (Pocahontas was a trafficked and abused Mohawk child). Basing my read off of Michel's reading of America, the painting is a visual proclamation that there has been a successful rape and impregnation of Turtle Island by American settlers. The religious ceremony depicts the embodiment of the land now germinating American religious dominance which was believed would wash away the Indigenous blood and identity of this place.  Clearly, it has not or this post wouldn't be happening. :) 

The Rotunda Capital is a space of important ceremonial events. 

In a slideshow presentation during class these images struck me as they feature through (via the colonial gaze)

Screenshot of a Voicethread presentation from the class NAS 320 American Indians: Identity and Media - NAS320AL, Voicethread slide show by April Lindala at Northern Michigan University

delegates from varying nations. There is no story additional story that I presently know of behind these images. 

When I consider the timestamp on these photos and that these delegates might have traveled through the rotunda of the capital during their journey. I see them walking with an intention of ensuring their peoples safety from the ever shapeshifting demands of Western imperialism... and while walking through this extravagant and decadent place built by the forced labor of trafficked families and in the land of the original peoples...

The Baptism of Pocahontas is haunting, intentionally. 

To the non-settler it says, the Dawes act, Boarding Schools and more forced evils are coming. Adapt accordingly.