Flint and Feather by Charlotte Gray Read Free Book Online Page A

of class-ridden societies back home evaporated once they were settlers in frontier communities. The Iroquois, for their part, had successfully absorbed into their peoples any number of non-Indian women captured during skirmishes. And the Mohawks had a very particular status within Upper Canada. Valuable military allies and beneficiaries of a huge land grant, the heirs and followers of Sir William Johnson and Molly Brant had every right to consider themselves equal to the other Loyalists who had streamed north half a century earlier.
    Nevertheless, when George Johnson’s parents heard he wanted to marry a non-Mohawk, they were taken aback. Their objection centred not on any feelings about race but on a much more tangible issue: power. George’s mother, Helen Martin Johnson, had inherited through her own mother and grandmother one of the most important positions on the Six Nations Reserve: she was a hereditary clan mother of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawks within the Iroquois Confederacy. All members of the Iroquois Confederacy belonged to the Wolf Clan, the Tortoise Clan or the Bear Clan. These clans crossed tribal lines and were an essential element in the harmony betweenpeoples. As a clan mother, Helen Martin Johnson participated in discussions within the clan and among the Iroquois peoples on land allotments, disputes, public games, welfare of the elderly and sick, and compensation for crimes. The clan mothers decided who should be pine-tree chiefs and which hereditary chiefs should be the leaders of the ruling Confederacy Council. Helen Martin Johnson had the right to address the ruling Council when it met in the Six Nations Council House at Ohsweken. Council members paid attention to her words. Her hereditary position gave her far more status and authority than George’s father had in his role as pine-tree chief—a position he could not pass on to his children.
    George Johnson’s mother made little impression on those who did not know her well. Unlike her husband and son, she had not adopted European ways. Small and unsmiling, her black eyes expressionless, she made no effort to learn English and she still wore the traditional leggings and tunic of her people. In the market square in Brantford, or on the porch of the Tuscarora parsonage, she would sit cross-legged on the ground, a blanket pulled tight around her shoulders, staring silently at those around her and smoking a small carved pipe.
    Her own family, however, knew she was a woman to be reckoned with. She had already faced down her fellow leaders in the community in order to secure an important role for her son George on the reserve. When her brother died in 1843, she had stood up amongst all the Iroquois chiefs and proposed her son to replace him as a member of the Iroquois’s top decision-making body, the Council.
    The chiefs objected that as an official interpreter, George Johnson’s primary loyalty was to the colonial government, and that this responsibility compromised any claim he might make through his mother’s family. They argued that a salaried official of the colonial government would be in conflict of interest if he also assumed the responsibility of a chief. The position of interpreter gave George a lot of influence: though he was still in his twenties, he already acted as liaison between the colonial authorities and the Council. He represented the colonial government at the semi-annual distribution of gifts from the British government to the Six Nations. Moreover, his eagerness to speak at meetings did not sit well with the non-Mohawk chiefs. Hewas too keen to play a prominent role at ceremonial events (he looked magnificent in the fringed buckskin tunic and leggings stitched with countless quills that he wore for these occasions, and he knew it). The chiefs were uncomfortable with the fact that George’s father, John “Smoke” Johnson, was already a pine-tree chief. As a rule, sons never succeeded fathers on the Council, because they were