Читать книгу The Element Encyclopedia of Native Americans: An A to Z of Tribes, Culture, and History - Adele Nozedar - Страница 68

“The Mohawks have on all occasions shown their zeal and loyalty to the Great King; yet they have been very badly treated by his people.”

1743–1807

“Joseph Brant” was the name given by the Europeans to the Mohawk leader Theyebdabegea (meaning “two sticks tied together for strength”). Joseph was born in Ohio Country into the Wolf clan of his mother—it was the practice among matrilineal tribes, as the Wolf were, for the child to belong to its mother’s people.

Joseph’s father died before he was ten, at which point his mother moved back to a Mohawk village in the New York area with her son and his elder sister Molly. Shortly afterward, his mother married a Mohawk chief named Canagaraduncka, who also carried the name of Brant. Brant’s family had strong connections with the British, his father being one of the Four Mohawk Kings who actually visited Britain in 1710. The family were relatively wealthy, although none of the lineage of his stepfather was passed on to the young Joseph because of that matrilineal line.

Joseph’s new stepfather had a good friend, Sir William Johnson, a very influential man who was the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the area. Joseph’s sister Molly and Johnson got to know one another, since Johnson spent a lot of time at the house, and the two subsequently married.

Sir William Johnson, now Joseph’s brother-in-law, took an interest in the young Mohawk, to the point of supervising his education. Joseph was sent with two other Mohawk boys to a school that would later become Dartmouth College. A clever boy, he was a quick study and was schooled in Latin and Greek as well as English. Like other Native American boys, Brant was introduced at an early age to the arts of warfare, and had followed Sir William into battle at the tender age of 13 during the French and Indian Wars. After this excitement, he returned to school.

It’s certain that Joseph was a talented linguist, and it has been suggested that he was fluent in all six of the Iroquois Confederacy languages—an extremely valuable asset. Because of his language skills and the fact that he had adopted the Christian faith, Brant acted as an interpreter for a Christian missionary named Reverend John Stuart; their work together resulted in the translation of the Gospel of Mark, and the common prayer book, into the Mohawk language. In later life Joseph would translate more Christian works.

When he was 25 or so, in 1768, Brant married a woman named Christine, whose father was an Oneida chief. The couple had met at school, and they had two wedding ceremonies: a Native American and an Anglican one. When Christine died just three years later, she left behind a daughter and a son. A couple of years after this, Joseph married Christine’s sister, Susannah, who also died shortly afterward of the same disease: tuberculosis.

In 1775 Brant was promoted to the rank of Captain and was dispatched to England; here he met King George III, and two dinners were held in his honor.

Once he returned to America, Brant led four of the Iroquois League Nations into attacks on the colonial outposts at the borders of the New York Frontier. During the War of Independence, the Iroquois League split in its allegiances. Two of the tribes favored the American case, while the others sided, with Brant, in favor of the British. Some of the tribal leaders preferred to remain neutral, hoping, no doubt, that the white men would all simply slaughter each other and turn their attentions away from the Native territories. Brant, however, argued against neutrality since he suspected that the Indians would lose all their lands if the colonists won the war and achieved independence.

Brant’s reputation as a formidable leader was cemented after an incident known as the Cherry Valley Massacre, in August 1778. Brant and his forces destroyed the town and fort at Cherry Valley in eastern New York. Some 30 men were killed, houses were burned to the ground, and 71 prisoners were captured. Subsequently, however, the British surrendered their lands to the colonists—and not to the Indians as they had promised.

A couple of years later Brant married his third wife, Catherine Croghan, who was the daughter of a Mohawk mother and an Irish father. Brant was now faced with having to find a new home, not just for himself and his new wife, but for the Mohawk tribes. During this time he also helped the new U.S. Commissioners make peace treaties with the Native peoples, regained his Army commission, and was awarded a tract of land for the Mohawk to settle on. This land was on the Grand River in Ontario. This territory—the Grand River Reservation—was established in 1784, and almost 2,000 Iroquois loyalists set up home there. All six tribes belonging to the Iroquois Nation were included, although the majority of the settlers were from the Mohawk and Cayuga tribes.

The year 1785 saw Brant return once again to England, where he managed to secure compensation for Mohawk losses in the War of Independence. He had also wanted to gain a secure holding on the lands that had been granted the tribes, but was unable to do so.

Brant was a keen missionary, and in 1785 he oversaw the building of a small Protestant chapel on the reservation: Her Majesty’s Chapel of the Mohawks is a small wooden building which still stands today, and is the only place of worship with the title “Chapel Royal” outside the U.K. Brant believed that the Mohawk could learn a lot from the Christian faith, and encouraged white settlers onto Mohawk and Iroquois land, believing that the two races would learn from each other; this arrangement was unsettling for some. He also tried to arrange a proper land settlement between the Iroquois and the United States, and fought against further land cessions. He continued with his translations of the Bible up until his death in 1807 in Burlington, Ontario. He is buried at the Chapel of the Mohawks.