Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT This essay situates the life of Mary Kittamaquund Brent, the so-called Pocahontas of Maryland, within the larger context of intercultural diplomacy in seventeenth-century Maryland. It argues that the marriage between Mary, an eleven-year-old girl and the daughter of the Tayac (chief) of the Piscataway Confederacy, and Giles Brent, a forty-year-old member of a wealthy English Catholic family, demonstrates that sex and reproduction were key strategies for establishing diplomatic relationships between groups and for securing power in a particularly tumultuous time. Illuminating Mary Kittamaquund Brents position as an embodied locus of power struggles between Chesapeake tribes and Anglo-Marylanders discloses both the role of Indigenous women in diplomacy and the importance of kinship in interethnic alliances. This article provides a brief background of Piscataway and Maryland colonial history, contextualizes the marriage of Giles and Mary Kittamaquund Brent, analyzes the place of sex and reproduction in western shore diplomacy, and considers Mary Kittamaquund Brents place in the history of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake.
Nestled between the U.S. Post Office and Route 1 (also known as Jefferson Davis Highway) in Stafford, Virginia, sits a humble historical marker. Erected in 2010, the inscription reads:
Mary was the only child of Kittamaquund, paramount chief of the Piscataway tribes when Lord Baltimore's settlers arrived in Maryland in 1634. In 1641, sevenyear-old Mary became the ward of Maryland Governor Leonard Calvert and his sister-in-law Margaret Brent. Three years later, Mary was married to Margaret Brent's 38-year-old brother, Giles Brent, who likely intended to gain control of Piscataway lands through the alliance. The Brents moved to Virginia to lands near here in 1647, where Giles and Mary had at least three children. Giles remarried in 1654, but there is no record of Mary's death.1
Many of the biographical details included here are incorrect. Even more striking, Mary Kittamaquund Brent appears remarkably absent from this summary of her life. The text presents her marriage to Giles Brent in passive voice, which not only glosses over the fact that she was an adolescent girl, but also erases her agency and personhood. Mary Kittamaquund Brent appears not as a human being with thoughts or feelings but rather as a pawn of the ambitious Brent family. With the exception of a few well-known women like Pocahontas or...
