hash versus hash pointer
I believe that the use of the term "pointer" in the this sentence is not referring to the low-level data type, such as int *pointer_to_int; would be in C.  I think it's more referring to a "pointer" as a key into a data structure or database table.  In this sense, the hash is a pointer/key used to retrieve the information you are looking for.

For example, in Bitcoin, transaction hashes are used in this way.  The hash of a transaction can both be used to look up the transaction and to verify that the transaction retrieved has not been tampered with since it was stored.