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.

This chapter examines the American Revolution in the territory of the Six Nations and in colonial New York as an example of the shift in power to settlers and settler rejection of Indigenous modes of alliance that also typified the expansion of settler colonialism elsewhere. In borderland regions, the American Revolution was also a land war. Ethnic cleansing and warfare broke many of such fragile bonds of kinship (real and fictive) as existed between settlers and Indigenous peoples, even as the metaphor of brotherhood was important to Ranger groups in which Indigenous and settler soldiers fought together. Difference was entrenched through violence. Specific examples of the politics of kinship examined include nineteenth-century settler family stories about warfare, including stories about Joseph Brant, who was often taken as a symbol of settler relationships with the Six Nations; changing practices of captive-taking on the part of the Six Nations; complex relationships between white and Indigenous soldiers; and the breaking of kinship links between the Six Nations themselves, in which the Brants played a significant role.