1 - Before the Revolution

Summary

In the context of a wider study of the evolution through time of relationships between Indigenous peoples, settlers and the British empire though the example of three family histories, this initial chapter starts in the borderlands between the lands of the Haudenosaunee and colonial New York just before the revolution. It re-reads the well-known histories of Haudenosaunee siblings Joseph and Molly Brant (Thayendenegea and Konwatsienni) and of British Superintendent of Indians William Johnson, Molly Brant’s partner, in a wider regional context. The chapter takes the Mohawk Valley as an example of a context in which the empire was compelled to accept to some extent the models of incorporation, including the creation of kinship links designed to foster mutual obligations, used by Indigenous people who were still key military allies. At the same time, William Johnson also used household power (including the ownership of enslaved people) to attempt to dominate a complex society. Before the Revolution, people in Mohawk Valley borderlands lived in a state of uneasy equilibrium, held together in part by the empire’s military need of an alliance with the Haudenosaunee, even as regional violence made relationships increasingly untenable.