"Pocahontas" is a song written by Neil Young that was first released on his 1979 album Rust Never Sleeps. It has also been covered by Johnny Cash, Everclear, Emily Loizeau, Crash Vegas, Gillian Welch and Ian McNabb.

Young originally recorded a version of "Pocahontas" in the mid-1970s for his planned but unreleased album Chrome Dreams, and an early recording of the song is included on Young's 2017 release Hitchhiker.

Young may have been inspired to write the song after reading Hart Crane's 1930 poem The Bridge, which Young read in London in 1971. The seventeenth-century Native American princess Pocahontas is a central character in The Bridge.

Commentators over the years have noted the song's similarity to Carole King's "He's a Bad Boy."

Rolling Stone contributing editor Rob Sheffield finds "Pocahontas" to be "an agonizingly lonely ballad." The themes of "Pocahontas" include passage of time, travel through space and companionship.Rolling Stone critic Paul Nelson claims that "Young sails through time and space like he owns them." The lyrics of "Pocahontas" primarily describe the massacre of an Indian tribe by European settlers. However, by the end of the song the lyrics have jumped to modern times, with a fictional meeting in the Astrodome between the narrator, Pocahontas and Indian rights activist actor Marlon Brando.

"Pocahontas" begins with an image that evokes "a cold breeze whistling by":

It then describes the massacre. According to music critic Johnny Rogan, Young describes the tragedy with restraint. The narrator appears to be in the middle of the situation with the word "might" in the lines "They killed us in our teepee," but then undercuts that appearance with the lines "They might have left some babies/Cryin' on the ground." Rogan discusses the disorientating effect of these lines. While the tragedy is described in the first person, the word "might" also creates a more disinterested tone. The listener is also unsure whether to be relieved that the soldiers might have shown some small degree of mercy to these babies, or whether to feel even greater anger that the defenseless babies were left to probably die slowly out in the open. According to Rogan, Young's "casual" delivery adds to the horror even more.

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Wikipedia