Inventing a Past: Molly Brant’s Life in Leadership

How do you write the history of someone for whom no image exists? Who surfaces intermittently in scraps of words found across hundreds of pages of archival documents? Whose singularity is so often glossed and aggregated as “Indian”?

By trying to get inside how she behaved and why to recover who she might have been.

Molly Brant belonged to a people known popularly as “Mohawk” but who referred to themselves as Kanien’kehá:ka, the People of the Flint, a name which tied them to the cosmic struggle that created the human world. They stood as the most powerful nation in a confederacy typically called “Iroquois” but known by the People of the Flint as Rotinonhsiónni, the People of the Longhouse, who proved to be the Crown’s staunchest allies across that handful of hard and bloody years remembered as the Revolutionary War.

To try to reconstruct a first person’s history begins with creating an interpretive matrix that approximates the culture in question into which what facts or events are known can be placed in order to connect them in meaningful ways. This method is known as ethnohistory. Its main flaws are that the material we use to build the matrix is usually derived from archaeological or ethnographical research created decades if not centuries after the life in question, and the method presumes a deep cultural continuity, rather than change, across time. Reconstructing how Molly Brant demonstrated leadership, why she was able to do so, and what it meant requires an acknowledgement that the history of her life we write will rely on a blend of comparative transhistorical analogical ethnography and reasoned imagination that, if it comes together, will ring with the closest thing we can call the truth.

Of what does the cultural matrix into which Molly Brant was born and through which she lived consist? For the People of the Flint, women had custody of the land and contributed the corn, beans, and squash that they grew to the subsistence of their households and villages. Their bloodlines stitched together the matrilineal clans to which everyone belonged. Children of the same clan and generation regarded their mother, her sisters, and all clan women of their mother’s generation to be mothers, and extended families lived in communal longhouses over which the most senior woman, the clan mother, presided. Clans prospered by arranging marriages with desirable partners and by investing members with political and ceremonial titles inherited and given by clan mothers. Control of food, land, and titles endowed Kanien’kehá:ka women with a powerful place from which leadership could be exerted on behalf of their families and clans. “It was always the Custom,” one male leader remarked, “for [women] to be present [at councils] . . . being of Much Estimation Amongst Us, in that we proceed from them, & they provide our Warriors with Provisions when they go abroad.”[1]

Within such a web of powers and possibilities, Molly Brant’s life takes a certain shape. In 1736 she was born to a powerful family in Canajoharie in present-day upstate New York. At twenty-three she took the place of her deceased aunt as the wife of William Johnson, the Crown’s superintendent of Indian affairs for the northern colonies, to ensure the People of the Flint remained key imperial partners in the ongoing war against France. Johnson’s death in 1774 imperiled her position, but when the colonies rose in arms and the British needed firm friends and allies, Brant, now in her late thirties, used her far-reaching kin and social networks to gather wartime intelligence that aided British forces. She positioned herself as the key to the Crown’s alliance with the People of the Flint and with the whole Rotinonhsiónni confederacy. At one key moment, just after the disastrous British defeat at Saratoga, the People of the Longhouse’s council met to debate their next step and some male leaders urged either a change of sides or retreat to neutrality. The clan mother Brant, however, recounted through tears the confederacy’s close friendship with King George and her own ties to the Crown as the former superintendent’s widow, and urged the council to stand fast. Which they did until a patriot invasion put their homes and fields to the torch and drove the People of the Flint into flight.[2]

Brant retained her position and power by brokering information and military support in exchange for trade goods, food, clothing, and shelter for her people when they resettled at the British outpost of Niagara. As one English officer observed, she was “obliged to keep, in a manner, open house for all those Indians that have any weight in the 6 Nations Confederacy.” But the empire had other needs. The leaders of two hundred or so refugee Rotinonhsiónni and Anishinabé who had resettled at Fort Haldimand on Carleton Island in the St. Lawrence River near present-day Kingston, Ontario, were becoming restive because of a lack of supplies and support. Unable to placate the refugees, the supreme British commander ordered Brant from Niagara to Carleton Island, where he hoped she might impose order and discipline on the Crown’s disenchanted allies. Happy to leave Niagara for a place closer to the action, she looked forward to rendering to the Crown what she considered to be her “little services.”[3]

At Carleton Island she diagnosed jealousy between the community’s leaders: the source of the strife was that those who threatened to abandon the British received more supplies and support than those who remained loyal. Situating herself between the Crown and the refugees, she used her access to military supplies to ameliorate their bad feelings and restore their commitment to the British. It worked. As one officer reported, “the Chiefs were careful to keep their people sober and satisfied, but their uncommon good behavior is in a great Measure to be ascribed to Miss Molly.” When taken together with the intelligence her networks provided on Continental troop movements and invasion plans, her leadership of scattered loyalist Indigenous communities made clear to military observers that the clan mother’s influence was “far superior to that of all their Chiefs put together.”[4]

But just as the war had opened an opportunity for Brant to enhance her and her clan’s and confederacy’s status and power, the peace marked the end of her tenure as a loyalist leader and imperial broker. In reward for her wartime services, however, the Crown granted Brant a lifetime annual pension of one hundred pounds. She retired to a fine home overlooking the Cataraqui River in Kingston, Ontario, where, still mindful of her clan mother duties, she married five of her daughters to prominent Canadian gentlemen and British officers. Her sole surviving son, George, too found employment in the British Indian department. Having fulfilled her family obligations, she became involved in the local Anglican church and passed away quietly in 1796.

From the archival sources, Molly Brant’s life, as told secondhand, appears episodic and unknowable. But because she belonged to the People of the Flint and was a powerful Rotinonhsiónni clan mother, we can refract what little the historical documents record through a prism of much later ethnographic research to create a more fully fledged narrative. Such an approach invariably warps what we can perceive and say, but it is also all we have unless we concede the utter impossibility of ever knowing the past. We make a past out of the stories we can tell, and to recount Molly Brant’s life as a leader requires reaching across centuries and braiding historical research, cultural interpretation, and reasoned imagination to create a story that rings true.

James Taylor Carson was a professor of Indigenous histories at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, for twenty years. He is now head of the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. He is the author of The Columbian Covenant: Race and the Writing of American History (Palgrave, 2015).