Sophia Durant

Sophia Durant (c. 1752 – c. 1813/1831) was a Koasati Native American plantation owner who served as the speaker, interpreter, and translator for her brother, Alexander McGillivray, a leader in the Muscogee Confederacy.

Durant was born to a mixed-race Native mother and Scottish father in the mid-18th century on Muscogee Confederacy lands in what is now Elmore County, Alabama. Taught reading and writing, she influenced her people's political and economic development. After managing with her husband, probably a mixed-race Black/Native man, her father's estates in Savannah, Georgia, for three or four years, Durant returned to Muscogee territory and established the first cattle plantation in the Tensaw District of the nation. She also managed communal lands as part of her matriarchal inheritance at Hickory Ground and operated as a middleman between Anglo and Native traders. She enslaved more people than nearly any other enslaver in the nation; she often treated the people she enslaved as part of her extended family and was lenient in their work requirements, sharing communally with them.

Durant had 11 children, although only seven or eight grew to adulthood. Three of them joined the Red Stick's faction during the Creek Civil War. In the 1813 Fort Mims massacre, her husband was killed, and she was captured. Taken to Econochaca, a Red Stick settlement,^[1] she was freed by American troops after the Battle of Holy Ground and died before 1831. Because she is one of the few Native women mentioned by name in the 18th-century record, modern historians have broadened the understanding of gender and the contributions of Native women in her era's political and economic development. Her relationships with her people in bondage have also added to the study of slave societies and their complexity.