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. 
Following 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 
confederacy 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.
