[Allison Kessinger, Rooted Heritage Genealogy: January 30, 2022 at 9:21 PM]
I can personally trace my ancestry back to Christian Pettus Martin using primary source documents. Patawomeck tradition has long said that Christian's mother was a Native American woman named Ka-Okee - long before the Mattaponi oral history of Pocahontas' first child was known outside of the Mattaponi tribe. It was historian William Deyo who was able to connect the dots between the two. This theory will probably never be able to be "proven" by traditional standards; but at the same time, many a commonly accepted theory has been based on less.”
[Allison Kessinger, Rooted Heritage Genealogy: Sunday, May 20, 2018 - Ka-Okee: Daughter of Pocahontas or Genealogy Legend?]
The internet is now full of stories about Ka-Okee, the supposed lost daughter of Pocahontas and her first husband, the warrior Kokoum. While many people embraced the story immediately, others have been quick to immediately dismiss it as the stuff of genealogical fairy-tales.
I first found the story of Ka-Okee when researching a line of my own family. I am descended from Ka-Okee through her daughter, Christian Pettis, and her granddaughter, Ann Martin, who married Edward Watts. In searching for the two names together, I came across the book Shawnee Heritage IV by Don Greene, who connected the couple to Ka-Okee via Christian Pettis, and the original Patawomeck Tides newsletter where the story of Ka-Okee made its debut.
The basic premise of the Patawomeck tribal historian, Bill Deyo, seemed to be simple enough: he knew of several families who claimed descent from Pocahontas according to their family traditions, but none of them descended from the Bollings, the family from which all of Pocahontas' documented descendants come (via her granddaughter Jane Rolfe, who married a Bolling). They did, however, all descend from the Martin and Pettus families. There was already a long-standing oral tradition in the Martin family that one of their early colonial ancestors had married a Native American girl named Ka-Okee. Deyo knew that Ka-Okee must connect to Pocahontas, but he did not know how.
Deyo subsequently discovered the book The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History by Dr. Linwood "Little Bear" Custalow and Angela L. Daniel "Silver Star." In this book, Angela L. Daniel recorded the sacred oral history of the Mattaponi tribe, as told by Dr. Custalow, their chief. The oral history had been passed down from generation to generation for hundreds of years, and had never before been recorded in writing. The Mattaponi people were the tribe of Pocahontas' mother. The book confirmed that there must have been another child besides Thomas Rolfe, the child of Pocahontas and John Rolfe.
Deyo concluded that as all lines led back to the Martin family, the child must have married into the family at some point, and that this child must have been Ka-Okee, the Native American ancestor that had been part of their family traditions for generations. In the timeline at the end of the book, the authors state that between 1610 and 1612, Pocahontas came of age. She was about thirteen years old. Pocahontas fell in love with and married Kokoum, an elite Patawomeck warrior and a guard at Werowocomoco. They eventually moved to the Patawomeck tribe and had a child. Because the baby's name is not known, he is referred to in the manuscript as "Little Kokoum." If the name of the child was not known, it is reasonable to speculate that the gender of the child might also have been unknown; the child could just as easily have been a daughter as a son
Here is my interpretation of the information found, and my opinion on Ka-Okee:
- The book The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History should be considered a credible source, and the assertion that Pocahontas and Kokoum had a child together should be taken as fact. The book was originally a dissertation, written as the final step in Angela Daniel's requirements to earn a Ph.D. in anthropology from the College of William and Mary, an Ivy League institution. This manuscript had to go through a rigorous processes of review from a dissertation committee made up of experts in the field, and everything in the manuscript that could be confirmed via documentation was in fact documented. If a committee of experts in the field accepted these assertions from the Mattaponi tribe as fact, so should we.
- William Strachey, a member of the Virginia Company, wrote in 1612 that Pocahontas was married to Kokoum for at least two years. Two years is plenty of time in which to have a child. Yes, the couple would have been very young; but during the early 17th century, young girls were frequently married in their early teenage years and bore children soon thereafter.
Based on the available information, I absolutely believe that Pocahontas and Kokoum had a child. I believe that it is very likely that this child was female, and that this is a huge part of the reason why this story has not been known until now. I believe that it is very possible that this child was the Native American woman known as Ka-Okee who married Thomas Pettus.
