Chandeliers throw gold light across a London reception hall in 1776. A Mohawk war belt rests in his hands, and the king’s ministers are listening.
It is 1776.
He grew up moving between two worlds from a young age, schooled by Anglican missionaries in Connecticut, fluent in English and Mohawk, converted to Christianity and trusted enough to help translate the Book of Common Prayer and the Gospel of Mark into his own language. He was also a Mohawk of the Wolf Clan, raised inside a Confederacy that had negotiated with European empires for a hundred and fifty years and had no intention of stopping now.
When the colonies broke from the Crown, he did not see a fight over liberty. He saw a fight over land, and he judged that the empire already occupying the continent was less dangerous to his people’s territory than the one trying to take it from that empire. He sailed to London in 1776 and told the king’s ministers as much, that his people’s homelands could not survive an American victory, and that the Crown needed to say so plainly. He left with a war belt and a captain’s commission.
The following August he led Mohawk and allied warriors into one of the war’s bloodiest ambushes, cutting apart a New York militia column at Oriskany. Two years later his name was tied to a raid on Cherry Valley that Americans would call a massacre. He said afterward that he had tried to stop the killing of women and children, and some later historians believe him, though the record is not clean enough to settle it either way.
The Continental Army answered in kind. In 1779 its soldiers burned more than forty Haudenosaunee towns and the cornfields that fed them, a scorched earth campaign meant to end the war on the frontier by starving the people who lived there. When peace came in 1783, it came without him and without his people’s consent, and it cost the Six Nations most of what remained of their land in New York.
He spent what remained of his life building somewhere for his people to stand, negotiating with the Crown for a new grant of land on the Grand River in Canada and leading Mohawk families north to settle it. A man some Americans still call a traitor to a revolution he never joined described himself, more simply, as a man trying to keep a homeland out of the hands of a country that had already decided it did not need his permission.
His name is Joseph Brant.
Now we know em.
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