A 25-day Tenure: The Story of the First Indigenous Parliamentarian Elected in Canada

In January 1831, Tekarihogen John Brant became the first Indigenous parliamentarian elected in Canada. Twenty- five days later he was out of office. A year later he was dead. It would be more than a century before a second First Nations Member would be elected to another Canadian legislature, and almost two centuries before Ontario would see another provincial parliamentarian of First Nations ancestry and community citizenship. In this article, the author recounts the short life and political career of a member of a famed Kanyen’kehá:ka (Mohawk) dynasty.

Michael Morden

Michael Modern is Director of Legislative Research at the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.

John Brant was the scion of a declining dynasty for a waning age. His father was Thayendanegea Joseph Brant, the famed Kanyen’kehá:ka (Mohawk) leader who was so essential in his allyship to the Crown during the American revolutionary  war. After the war, Joseph prompted the Governor of Quebec to set aside land along the Grand River where some of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee settled. Joseph was received by King George III in London, and President George Washington in Philadelphia, and lived grandly at a country manor at Burlington Bay. He was likely among the largest slave owners in Upper Canada.

John’s aunt was Konwatsi’tsiaiénni Molly Brant, a Mohawk clan mother and the common-law wife of Sir William Johnson, the first British Superintendent of Indian Affairs. Molly and William had eight children and presided at the crossroads of the British and Haudenosaunee empires in western New York. After the revolutionary war, Molly lived out her days as an honoured citizen of Kingston.

During the War of 1812, the Haudenosaunee again came to the military rescue of the British and Canadians. The teenager John Brant was in the thick of it. He won praise fighting as a commissioned officer at Queenston Heights, Fort George, Beaver Dams, and the Chippawa.

John followed his father’s example. He emerged as a leader in both Indigenous and settler society while still a young man. In 1828, he was invested with the title of Tekarihogen and became the leading Mohawk chief of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Weeks later, Upper Canada’s Indian Department named him superintendent on the Grand River, so that he held senior public office in the colonial and Haudenosaunee administrations simultaneously.1

Seeking a seat at the provincial parliament was a natural step. The Assembly was a straightforwardly colonial institution, but it wouldn’t have been unfamiliar to a Haudenosaunee leader, least of all a Brant. Haudenosaunee were present from the very beginning of Ontario’s parliamentary life. Chiefs attended when John Graves Simcoe opened the first Upper Canadian Assembly in Niagara in 1792. Joseph Brant had led delegations of hundreds of Mohawks to the capital at York. John was himself in frequent correspondence with Members of the Assembly.

In the years before his election, John was especially occupied with the building of the Welland Canal, and the destruction it wrought on Six Nations land. The Welland Canal Company dammed the lower Grand River in order to feed the canal, thereby flooding Haudenosaunee corn fields and destroying fisheries. John appealed to the colonial administration and to the Assembly itself.

Parliament did nothing to stop the flooding; the Attorney General, Solicitor General, Receiver General and other senior politicians were Company directors.2 But it did finally convene a select committee on the question of compensation for flooded lands. The Anishinabek Chief and missionary Kahkewaquonaby Peter Jones attended the committee, afterward recording his distaste for parliamentary incivility: “If [chiefs] in their councils were to speak so hard to each other, I think the tomahawk would soon be raised.”3

John Brant was elected in the riding of Haldimand in 1830, and joined the first sitting of the 42-Member Legislative Assembly on January 7, 1831. His tenure was short and difficult.

John Warren, the candidate he had nominally defeated, immediately challenged the election result. Brant was alleged to have received votes from Grand River residents who leased their land from Six Nations. Election law limited the franchise to property owners only (which naturally worked as de facto disenfranchisement of most Haudenosaunee, should they have had wanted to participate in an Upper Canadian election).

Leaseholder voting was an open political question at the time. Oddly, it was the reformers of the day who opposed giving leaseholders the vote. The general view was that most leaseholders were a more quiescent class of recent immigrants, whose support would skew toward the establishment Family Compact.4

But it was settled law that leaseholder votes were invalid, so the Assembly convened a select committee to assess the charge. Suspicion didn’t fall on Brant himself, but on Haldimand’s election administrators. The committee demanded that three impugned returning officers deliver the poll book and testify to their conduct.

A kind of ‘dog-ate-my-homework’ routine ensued. One returning officer appeared at the committee but failed to produce the poll book, which he said he had to leave at home because it wouldn’t fit it in his trunk. This was an excuse with a terrible shelf life, since he did have to produce the poll book eventually. When he finally did so, the committee noted acidly that “the said poll book, containing only one quire of paper, is from its size very easily carried.”5

The other two returning officers failed to turn up altogether, so they were found guilty of a breach of Parliament’s privileges and the Sergeant-at-Arms was dispatched to round them up. When they appeared at the bar, both men insisted they’d been absolutely set on attending, but by bad luck had been levelled by illness: “nothing less than the great danger I apprehended, from exposure to cold… could have prevented my obeying your summons.”6

With evidence finally at hand, the committee found in favour of Warren. They chalked the election workers’ conduct up to ignorance rather than intrigue—though the poll book prevaricator was hauled to the bar for a further bawling out.7 The House promptly reversed the election result. Brant lost his seat on February 1, “not from any objection to Mr. Brant, as an Indian, but owing to the improper conduct of the returning officer,” claimed the Canadian Freeman.8

Brant’s story ends abruptly. In the following year, the cholera pandemic reached Canada for the first time. Newspaper accounts of the event have a familiar ring, with their early optimism that cholera was something that only affected other lands. Then, as it took hold in Quebec and began to burn up the St. Lawrence, they contended it was something that only affected other people: “Almost all cases can be traced either to intemperate habits, or pre-existing disease …”9 But, by the summer of 1832, the reality had landed in Kingston, then Cobourg, then York and places west. John Brant received treatment for cholera in Brantford, and died there in August at age 37. His rival and successor John Warren died too.

We tend to think about “firsts” in public office as harbingers of new eras and signals of new openness. Tekarihogen John Brant’s election was the opposite. The Brants were the late face of a period when Haudenosaunee were at the centre of political life in the Great Lakes and beyond. It wasn’t a more enlightened time than what followed. But it was a time when colonial attitudes and ambitions were tempered by Indigenous power.

After the War of 1812, though, the old treaty relationship degraded, and the Canadian policy toward First Nations shifted toward control. It’s noteworthy that within two years of Brant’s dismissal from the Assembly, Canada’s first residential school had begun boarding students from his home community at Six Nations.10 In time, electoral law would be clarified to formally exclude Status First Nations—even those who owned property. That exclusion persisted in federal law, with brief exceptions, until 1960.

At the provincial parliament, a long absence of Indigenous people ensued. And in time, provincial leaders became alienated from Indigenous realities that had been so foundational to the political community. When the federal government suggested in 1888 that Six Nations were still owed compensation for the Welland Canal flooding, Premier Oliver Mowat was incredulous. He told the House he could not countenance a claim where “the actors…are dead… and the facts become obscure through lapse of time,” notwithstanding the Dominion government’s fondness for “antiquarian research.”11

The resurgence would eventually come. Given how identity is contested and obscured, it is difficult to say definitively how long the absence of Indigenous representation at the provincial parliament lasted. Solomon White (Essex North) was born at a Wyandot reserve near Amherstburg but opted for enfranchisement and—quite radically—dissolved his reserve and forfeited status before his election to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario in 1878.12 Peter North (Elgin), first elected in 1990, held Indian Status through his adoptive mother, but downplayed his connection.13 Other Members have cited First Nations and Métis family history.

But Ontario wouldn’t see another provincial parliamentarian of First Nations ancestry and community citizenship until the election of Sol Mamakwa (Kiiwetinoong) in 2018—187 years after John Brant.

Notes

1 Nathan Ince (2021), An Empire within an Empire: The Upper Canadian Indian Department, 1796-1845, PhD Dissertation, McGill, p 130.

2 Hugh G. J. Aitken (1952), “The Family Compact and the Welland Canal Company,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 18:1, p 65.

3 Kevin Hutchings (2020), Transatlantic Upper Canada: Portraits in Literature, Land, and British-Indigenous Relations, McGill-Queen’s University Press, p 185.

4 John Garner (1969), The Franchise and Politics in British North America, 1755-1687, University of Toronto Press, p 85.

5 Journal of the House of Assembly of Upper Canada, 1st Session of 11th Parliament (1831), p 35.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 The Canadian Freeman, Feb 27, 1831, p 85.

9 The Colonial Advocate, June 28, 1832, p 2.

10 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015), Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 1: Origins to 1930: p 66.

11 Globe Toronto (Scrapbook Hansard), March 17, 1888. URL: https://vitacollections.ca/ Ontario-Scrapbook-Hansard/3598267/page/ 4?q=indian&docid=OOI.3598267

12 Peter E. Paul Dembski, “Solomon White,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography. URL: http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/white_ solomon_14E.html

13 See for instance, Chris Hall, “An Honest Man: Peter North is new to his task, but he’s frank, a fast learner, and claims to know what makes small business work,” Ottawa Citizen, October 25, 1990.