Credit: Chris West
To recognize the long history of indigenous settlement along the rivers and lakes of this areas, local Mohawk traditionalist, Laurel Claus-Johnson, performed a water ceremony at the start of the Shoreline Shuffle. We also read part of a poem about Molly Brant, an important aboriginal figure in the history of Kingston, written by the city's poet laureate, Eric Folsom. The poem is reproduced here, courtesy of the poet:
MOLLY IN WINTER
No stone marks her remains in the frozen churchyard
Despite being Swamp Ward’s original patroness,
But a chiselled tablet set flush to the outside wall
Of St. Paul’s Anglican remembers the children and grand-
Children of Sir William Johnson, the gentleman everyone
Knew was Molly’s husband, her partner in life and war.
So where is the mother?
“The brown Lady Johnson” was the settler’s jest,
Mistress Molly, Mary Brant, a profusion of names,
The blunt honorifics of a muddy garrison town;
And her Mohawk namings, lyric tongue-snatchers,
Konwatsi’tsiaiénni, Someone Hands Her A Flower,
And Degonwadonti, The Many Against One.
What shall we call her?
She flew over boundaries, our first dual citizen,
Her mark on our history is like steel driven
Into a tree trunk, tinting the wood around it
With a blue like a blue-dyed deerskin skirt;
She acted from a loyalty better described as love,
Helped fashion Katarokwi into Kingston.
Why did we forget her?
Black hair and clear skin, the accounts of the day
Say little more than Molly was native and beautiful.
The grey John Boxtel bust on the cairn behind Rideaucrest,
His anonymous model heroic from the neck up,
Pitted metal eyes on the skies above Barriefield,
Is sculptural guesswork, an artist’s conception.
Who was she really?
Shiver with us on the snowy hill facing downriver,
Imagine a Mohawk woman about sixty years of age
Who bore seven children, survived victory and defeat,
Recalls when the town was mostly cattails and birches,
Cured Governor Simcoe’s nagging chest complaint,
Bandaged the traumas of the nation she mothered.
When does she rest?
The blizzard thickens, the eastern sky darkens,
The icy river is frozen like a treaty still unwritten,
The town’s fifty chimneys with fifty plumes of smoke,
Disappear behind a veil like all the days and nights
And Molly herself obscured, old woman with a blanket,
Walking north in the snow, walking out of our lives.
How do we follow?
How do we live?
MOLLY IN WINTER
No stone marks her remains in the frozen churchyard
Despite being Swamp Ward’s original patroness,
But a chiselled tablet set flush to the outside wall
Of St. Paul’s Anglican remembers the children and grand-
Children of Sir William Johnson, the gentleman everyone
Knew was Molly’s husband, her partner in life and war.
So where is the mother?
“The brown Lady Johnson” was the settler’s jest,
Mistress Molly, Mary Brant, a profusion of names,
The blunt honorifics of a muddy garrison town;
And her Mohawk namings, lyric tongue-snatchers,
Konwatsi’tsiaiénni, Someone Hands Her A Flower,
And Degonwadonti, The Many Against One.
What shall we call her?
She flew over boundaries, our first dual citizen,
Her mark on our history is like steel driven
Into a tree trunk, tinting the wood around it
With a blue like a blue-dyed deerskin skirt;
She acted from a loyalty better described as love,
Helped fashion Katarokwi into Kingston.
Why did we forget her?
Black hair and clear skin, the accounts of the day
Say little more than Molly was native and beautiful.
The grey John Boxtel bust on the cairn behind Rideaucrest,
His anonymous model heroic from the neck up,
Pitted metal eyes on the skies above Barriefield,
Is sculptural guesswork, an artist’s conception.
Who was she really?
Shiver with us on the snowy hill facing downriver,
Imagine a Mohawk woman about sixty years of age
Who bore seven children, survived victory and defeat,
Recalls when the town was mostly cattails and birches,
Cured Governor Simcoe’s nagging chest complaint,
Bandaged the traumas of the nation she mothered.
When does she rest?
The blizzard thickens, the eastern sky darkens,
The icy river is frozen like a treaty still unwritten,
The town’s fifty chimneys with fifty plumes of smoke,
Disappear behind a veil like all the days and nights
And Molly herself obscured, old woman with a blanket,
Walking north in the snow, walking out of our lives.
How do we follow?
How do we live?