His father died when Joseph was young. One of Brant's friends in later life, John Norton, wrote that Brant's parents were not born Iroquois, but were rather Hurons taken captive by the Iroquois as young people; the Canadian historian James Paxton wrote this claim was "plausible" but "impossible to verify", going on to write that this issue is really meaningless as the Iroquois considered anybody raised as an Iroquois to be Iroquois, drawing no line between those born Iroquois and those adopted by the Iroquois. After his father's death, his mother Margaret (Owandah) returned to the province of New York from Ohio with Joseph and his sister Mary (also known as Molly). His mother remarried, and her new husband was known by whites as Barnet or Bernard, which was commonly contracted to Brandt or Brant. Molly Brant may actually been Brant's half-sister rather than his sister, but in Mohawk society, they would have been considered full siblings as they shared the same mother. They settled in Canajoharie, a Mohawk village on the Mohawk River, where they had lived before. The Mohawk in common with the other nations of the Haudenosaunee League had a very gendered understanding of social roles with power divided by the male "sachems" and chiefs and the clan mothers (who always nominated the male leaders) with decisions reached by consensus between the clan mothers and the chiefs. Mohawk women did all farming (considered woman's work), growing the "Three Sisters" of beans, corn, and squash while men went hunting and engaged in diplomacy and wars. In the society that Brant grew up, there was an expectation that he would be a warrior as a man. In the part of the New York frontier where Brant grew up, the area had been settled in the early 18th century by immigrants known as the Palatines, from the Palatine in what is now Germany. Relations between the Palatines and Mohawks were friendly with many Mohawk families renting out land to be farmed by the hard-working immigrants (though Mohawk elders complained that their young people were too fond of the beer brewed by the Palatines), and Brant grew up in a multicultural world surrounded by people speaking Mohawk, German and English. Paxton wrote that Brant self-identified as Mohawk, but as someone who grew with the Palatines, Scots and the Irish living in his part of Kanienkeh, the world that he grew up in was not entirely Mohawk, which explains why he was so comfortable with aspects of European culture.