I atten­ded a SRO lec­ture by Alan Taylor last week. He delivered a won­der­ful nar­rat­ive on the life of Joseph Brant couched in the cur­rently con­ten­tious dis­cus­sion over nat­ive land rights in the Grand River basin. Taylor is the author of a vari­ety of books, the most per­tin­ent being The Divided Ground: Indi­ans, Set­tlers, and the North­ern Bor­der­land of the Amer­ican Revolu­tion. taylormac.gifFol­low­ing a con­cise, if rather softly spoken, brief on the vari­ous parties play­ing in the story, he moved to the meat of the mat­ter. The key ele­ment that Taylor seemed to want the audi­ence to appre­ci­ate was that the Six Nations them­selves were by no means homo­gen­eous. Addi­tion­ally, the area into which they moved was by no means dom­in­ated by one party or another and was a pop­u­lated by a col­lec­tion of diverse groups already: pre-existing nat­ives such as the Mis­sissauga, recent set­tlers from either the US or from the Brit­ish Isles and sig­ni­fic­antly, a small, but vocal cadre of Brit­ish mil­it­ary forces. The res­ult is an inter­mixed cul­tur­ally diverse people in this area.
Turn­ing to Joseph Brant, Taylor sug­ges­ted that he was a skilled stra­tegi­cian, who prob­ably had the interests of his imme­di­ate band, if not the entire Six nations jbrant.jpgcon­fed­er­acy at heart as he attemp­ted to find a place where they could prac­tice their nat­ive cus­toms as a nation and exist in peer rela­tion­ship with Brit­ish North Amer­ica. To accom­plish this he engaged in an evolving series of tac­tics that included superb use of the media, threats, and out­right col­lu­sion with Amer­ican interests to main­tain a pre­cari­ous bal­ance of power. In the end he failed, partly through his inab­il­ity to garner con­sensus amongst the six nations, to attain out­right abil­ity to buy, sell and lease the land that was gran­ted to his con­fed­er­acy and ulti­mately through the con­tin­gen­cies of events tak­ing place out­side of his imme­di­ate sphere of influ­ence. Brant’s scheme to lease land within the Grand River reserve to Amer­ican land spec­u­lat­ors floundered when he over­played his hand mil­it­ar­ily and betrayed a deep racism within the colo­nial state that was unwill­ing to see set­tlers sub­ject to nat­ive land­lords. The talk was superbly atten­ded and, along with Lou Pauly’s the pre­vi­ous week kicks off the Wilson series for this year.