| Total population | |
|---|---|
| c. 3,000 | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
 United States (Shawano County, Wisconsin) | |
| Languages | |
| English, formerlyMohican | |
| Religion | |
| Moravian Church | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Lenape,Munsee,Abenaki |
TheMohicans orMahicans (/moʊˈhiːkənz/ or/məˈhiːkənz/) are anEastern AlgonquianNative Americantribe that historically spoke an Algonquian language. As part of the Eastern Algonquian family of tribes, they are related to the neighboringLenape, whose indigenous territory was to the south as far as the Atlantic coast. The Mohicans lived in the upper tidalHudson River Valley, including the confluence of the Mohawk River (where present-dayAlbany, New York, developed) and into western New England centered on the upperHousatonic River watershed. After 1680, due to conflicts with the powerfulMohawk to the west during theBeaver Wars, many were driven southeastward across the present-day Massachusetts western border and theTaconic Mountains toBerkshire County aroundStockbridge, Massachusetts.
They combined with Lenape Native Americans (a branch known as the Munsee) in Stockbridge, MA, and later the people moved west away from pressure of European invasion. They settled in what becameShawano County, Wisconsin. Most eastern Native American populations were forced to reservations in Indian Territory during the 1830s, and other reservations in theAmerican West later. Decades later the United States government organized theStockbridge-Munsee Community with registered members of theMunsee people and a 22,000-acre (89 km2) reservation, which was originally the land of the Menominee Nation.
Following the disruption of theAmerican Revolutionary War, most of the Mohican descendants first migrated westward to join theIroquoisOneida on their reservation in central New York. The Oneida gave them about 22,000 acres for their use. After more than two decades, in the 1820s and 1830s, the Oneida and the Stockbridge moved again, pressured to sell their lands and relocate to northeasternWisconsin under the federalIndian Removal Act.[1] A group of Mohican also migrated toOntario, Canada to live with the predominately IroquoisSix Nations of the Grand River reserve.
The tribe identified by the place where they lived:Muh-he-ka-neew (or "people of the continually flowing waters").[2] According to Daniel G. Brinton and James Hammond Trumbull "two well-known authorities on Mohican history", the wordMuh-he-kan refers to a body of water that flows in both directions, being tidal to most of its Mohican range, so they named the Hudson RiverMahicanuck, or the river with waters that are never still.[3] Therefore, they, along with other tribes living along the Hudson River, such as theMunsee to their west, known by the dialect of Lenape that they spoke, andWappinger to the south, were called "the River Indians" by the Dutch and English.
The Dutch heard and transliterated the term for the people of the area in their own language, variously as:Mahigan,Mahinganak,Maikan, among other variants, which the English later expressed asMohican, in a transliteration to their own spelling system. The French, adopting names used by their Indian allies in Canada, knew the Mohican as theLoups (or wolves). They referred to theIroquois Confederacy as the "Snake People" (as they were called by some competitors, or "Five Nations", representing their original tribes). Like the Munsee and Wappinger peoples, the Mohican were Algonquian-speaking, part of a large language family related also to theLenape people, who occupied coastal areas from western Long Island to theDelaware River valley to the south.
In the late twentieth century, the Mohican joined other former New York tribes, including theOneida and some other Iroquois nations, in filing land claims against New York for what were considered unconstitutional purchases of their lands after the Revolutionary War. Only the federal government had constitutional authority to deal with the Indian nations. In 2010, outgoing governorDavid Paterson announced a land exchange with the Stockbridge-Munsee that would enable them to build a large casino on 330 acres (130 ha) inSullivan County in theCatskills, as a settlement in exchange for dropping their larger claim inMadison County. The deal had many opponents.
Intheir own language, the Mohican identified collectively as theMuhhekunneuw, "people of the waters that are never still".[4]
At the time of theirfirst contact withEuropeans traders along the river in the 1590s, the Mohican were living in and around theHudson River (orMahicannituck). After 1609, at the time of the Dutch settlement ofNew Netherland, they also ranged along the easternMohawk River and theHoosic River, and south along the Hudson to theRoeliff Jansen Kill,[5] where they bordered on theWappinger people. This nation inhabited the river area and its interior southward to today's New York City.[6]
Most of the Mohican communities lay along the upper tidal reaches of the Hudson River and along the watersheds of Kinderhook-Claverack-Taghkanic Creek, the Roeliff Jansen Kill, Catskil Creek, and adjacent areas of theHousatonic watershed. Mohican territory reached along Hudson River watersheds northeastward to Wood Creek just south ofLake Champlain.
The Mohican villages were governed by hereditarysachems advised by a council of clan elders. They had amatrilineal kinship system, with property and inheritance (including such hereditary offices) passed through the maternal line. Moravian missionaryJohn Heckewelder and early anthropologistLewis H. Morgan both learned from Mohican informants that their matrilineal society was divided into threephratries (Turkey, Turtle, and Wolf). These were divided into clans or subclans, including a potentially prominent Bear Clan. This finding is supported by the evidence of Mohican signatures on treaties and land deeds (see the works ofShirley Dunn).
A general council of sachems met regularly atScodac (east of present-day Albany) to decide important matters affecting the entire confederacy.[4] In his history of the Indians of the Hudson River,Edward Manning Ruttenber described theclans of the Mohican as the Bear, the Turkey, the Turtle, and the Wolf. Each had a role in the lives of the people, and the Wolf served as warriors in the north to defend against theMohawk, the easternmost of the Five Nations of the Iroquois.[citation needed]
Like the Munsee-speaking communities to their south, Mohican villages followed a dispersed settlement pattern, with each community likely dominated by a single lineage or clan. The villages usually consisted of a small cluster of small and mid-sizedlonghouses, and were located along floodplains. During times of war, they built fortifications in defensive locations (such as along ridges) as places of retreat. Their cornfields were located near their communities; the women also cultivated varieties of squash, beans, sunflowers, and other crops from theEastern Agricultural Complex. Horticulture and the gathering and processing of nuts (hickory, butternuts, black walnuts and acorns), fruits (blueberries, raspberries,juneberries among many others), and roots (groundnuts, wood lilies, arrowroot among others) provided much of their diet. This was supplemented by the men hunting game (turkeys, deer, elk, bears, and moose in the Taconics) and fishing (sturgeon,alewives,shad, eels,lamprey andstriped bass).
The formally extinctMohican language belonged to theEastern Algonquian branch of theAlgonquian language family.
The Mohican were a confederacy of five tribes and as many as forty villages.[4]
The Algonquians (Mohican) andIroquois (Mohawk) were traditional competitors and enemies. Iroquois oral tradition, as recorded in theJesuit Relations, speaks of a war between the Mohawks and an alliance of theSusquehannock andAlgonquin (sometime between 1580 and 1600). This was perhaps in response to the formation of the League of the Iroquois.[9]
In September 1609 Henry Hudson encountered Mohican villages just below present day Albany, with whom he traded goods for furs. Hudson returned to Holland with a cargo of valuable furs which immediately attracted Dutch merchants to the area. The first Dutch fur traders arrived on the Hudson River the following year to trade with the Mohicans. Besides exposing them to European epidemics, the fur trade destabilized the region.[4]
In 1614, the Dutch decided to establish a permanent trading post onCastle Island, on the site of a previous French post that had been long abandoned; but first they had to arrange a truce to end fighting which had broken out between the Mohicans and Mohawks. Fighting broke out again between the Mohicans and Mohawks in 1617, and withFort Nassau badly damaged by a freshet, the Dutch abandoned the fort. In 1618, having once again negotiated a truce, the Dutch rebuilt Fort Nassau on higher ground.[10] Late that year, Fort Nassau was destroyed by flooding and abandoned for good. In 1624, CaptainCornelius Jacobsen May sailed theNieuw Nederlandt upriver and landed eighteen families ofWalloons on a plain opposite Castle Island. They commenced to constructFort Orange.
The Mohicans invited theAlgonquin andMontagnais to bring their furs to Fort Orange as an alternative to French traders in Quebec. Seeing the Mohicans extend their control over the fur trade, the Mohawk attacked, with initial success. In 1625 or 1626 the Mohicans destroyed the easternmost Iroquois "castle". The Mohawks then re-located south of theMohawk River, closer to Fort Orange. In July 1626 many of the settlers moved toNew Amsterdam because of the conflict. The Mohicans requested help from the Dutch and Commander Daniel Van Krieckebeek set out from the fort with six soldiers. Van Krieckebeek, three soldiers, and twenty-four Mohicans were killed when their party was ambushed by the Mohawk about a mile from the fort. The Mohawks withdrew with some body parts of those slain for later consumption as a demonstration of supremacy.[11]
War continued to rage between the Mohicans and Mohawks throughout the area from Skahnéhtati (Schenectady) to Kinderhoek (Kinderhook).[12] By 1629, the Mohawks had taken over territories on the west bank of the Hudson River that were formerly held by the Mohicans.[13] The conflict caused most of the Mohicans to migrate eastward across theHudson River into western Massachusetts and Connecticut. The Mohawks gained a near-monopoly in the fur trade with the Dutch by prohibiting the nearby Algonquian-speaking tribes to the north or east from trading.
Many Mohicans settled in the town ofStockbridge, Massachusetts, where they gradually became known as the "Stockbridge Indians".Etow Oh Koam, one of their chiefs, accompanied three Mohawk chiefs on a state visit toQueen Anne and her government in England in 1710. They were popularly referred to as theFour Mohawk Kings.
The Stockbridge Indians allowedProtestantmissionaries, includingJonathan Edwards, to live among them. In the 18th century, many converted toChristianity, while keeping certain traditions of their own. They fought on the side of the British colonists in theFrench and Indian War (also known as theSeven Years' War). During theAmerican Revolution, they sided with the colonists.[14]
In the eighteenth century, some of the Mohicans developed strong ties with missionaries of theMoravian Church fromBethlehem, Pennsylvania, who founded a mission at their village ofShekomeko inDutchess County, New York. Henry Rauch reached out to two Mohican leaders,Maumauntissekun, also known asShabash; andWassamapah, who took him back to Shekomeko. They named him the new religious teacher. Over time, Rauch won listeners, as the Mohicans had suffered much from disease and warfare, which had disrupted their society. Early in 1742, Shabash and two other Mohicans accompanied Rauch to Bethlehem, where he was to be ordained as a deacon. The three Mohicans were baptized on 11 February 1742 in John de Turk's barn nearby atOley, Pennsylvania. Shabash was the first Mohican of Shekomeko to adopt the Christian religion.[15] The Moravians built a chapel for the Mohican people in 1743. They defended the Mohican against European colonists' exploitation, trying to protect them against land encroachment and abuses of liquor.
On a 1738 visit to New York, the Mohicans spoke to GovernorLewis Morris concerning the sale of their land near Shekomeko. The Governor promised they would be paid as soon as the lands were surveyed. He suggested that for their own security, they should mark off their square mile of land they wished to keep, which the Mohicans never did. In September 1743, still under the Acting-GovernorGeorge Clarke the land was finally surveyed by New York Assembly agents and divided into lots, a row of which ran through the Indians' reserved land. With some help from the missionaries, on 17 October 1743 and already under the new Royal GovernorGeorge Clinton, Shabash put together a petition of names of people who could attest that the land in which one of the lots was running through was theirs. Despite Shabash's appeals, his persistence, and the missionaries' help, the Mohicans lost the case.[16] The lots were eventually bought up by European-American colonists and the Mohicans were forced out of Shekomeko. Some who opposed the missionaries' work accused them of being secretCatholicJesuits (who had been outlawed from the colony in 1700) and of working with the Mohicans on the side of the French. The missionaries were summoned more than once before colonial government, but also had supporters. In the late 1740s the colonial government atPoughkeepsie expelled the missionaries from New York, in part because of their advocacy of Mohican rights. European colonists soon took over the Mohican land.[17]
In August 1775, theSix Nations staged a council fire near Albany, after news of Bunker Hill had made war seem imminent. After much debate, they decided that such a war was a private affair between the British and the colonists (known as Rebels, Revolutionaries, Congress-Men, American Whigs, orPatriots), and that they should stay out of it. Mohawk ChiefJoseph Brant feared that the Indians would lose their lands if the Colonists achieved independence. SirWilliam Johnson, his sonJohn Johnson and son-in-lawGuy Johnson and Brant used all their influence to engage the Iroquois to fight for the British cause. TheMohawk,Onondaga,Cayuga, andSeneca ultimately became allies and provided warriors for the battles in the New York area. TheOneida andTuscarora sided with the Colonists. The Mohicans, who as Algonquians were not part of the Iroquois Confederacy, sided with the Patriots, serving at the Siege of Boston, and the battles of Saratoga and Monmouth.
In 1778 they lost forty warriors of theirStockbridge Militia, around half "Stockbridge Indians" who were remnants of both Mohican andWappinger tribes, in a British attack on the land of the van Cortlandt family. (In 1888, the property becameVan Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, New York.) TheBattle of Kingsbridge decimated the troop's ranks.[18] It received a commendation from George Washington,[19] was paid $1,000 and dismissed.[20]
After the Revolution the citizens of the new United States forced many Native Americans off their land and westward. In the 1780s, groups of Stockbridge Indians, today regarded asStockbridge Munsee, moved from Massachusetts to a new location among theOneida people in central New York, who had been granted a 300,000-acre (120,000 ha) reservation for their service to the Patriots, out of their former territory of 6,000,000 acres (2,400,000 ha). They called their settlementNew Stockbridge. Some individuals and families, mostly people who were old or those with special ties to the area, remained behind at Stockbridge.
The central figures of Mohican society, including the chief sachem, Joseph Quanaukaunt, and his counselors and relatives, were part of the move to New Stockbridge. At the new town, the Stockbridge emigrants controlled their own affairs and combined traditional ways with the new as they chose. After learning from the Christian missionaries, the Stockbridge Indians were experienced in English ways. At New Stockbridge they replicated their former town. While continuing as Christians, they retained their language and Mohican cultural traditions. In general, their evolving Mohican identity was still rooted in traditions of the past.[21]
In the 1820s and 1830s, most of the Stockbridge Indians moved toShawano County, Wisconsin, where they were promised land by the US government under the policy ofIndian removal. In Wisconsin, they settled onreservations with theLenape (called Munsee after one of their major dialects), who were also speakers of one of the Algonquian languages. Together, the two formed a band and are federally recognized as theStockbridge-Munsee Community.
Their 22,000-acre reservation is known as that of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians and is located near the town ofBowler. Since the late twentieth century, they have developed the North Star Mohican Resort and Casino on their reservation, which has successfully generated funds for tribal welfare and economic development.[22]
In the late twentieth century, the Stockbridge-Munsee were among tribes filing land claims against New York, which had been ruled to have unconstitutionally acquired land from Indians without Senate ratification. The Stockbridge-Munsee filed a land claim against New York state for 23,000 acres (9,300 ha) in Madison County, the location of its former property. In 2011, outgoing governorDavid Paterson announced having reached a deal with the tribe. They would be given nearly 2 acres (0.81 ha) in Madison County and give up their larger claim in exchange for the state's giving them 330 acres of land inSullivan County in theCatskill Mountains, where the government was trying to encourage economic development. The federal government had agreed to take the land in trust, making it eligible for development as a gaming casino, and the state would allow gaming, an increasingly important source of revenue for American Indians. Race track and casinos, private interests and other tribes opposed the deal.[22]
In 2011, the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of the Mohican Indians regained ownership 156 acres along the Hudson River, a tract known as Papscanee Island Nature Preserve nearEast Greenbush andSchodack. The land was donated to descendants of its indigenous inhabitants by the Open Space Initiative. Prior to colonization, the island was used for ceremonies by the Mohicans before it was acquired by Dutch merchantKiliaen Van Rensselaer in 1637. The property is managed by Rensselaer County and the Rensselaer Land Trust for public access and protection, while owned by the Mohicans.[23]
James Fenimore Cooper based his novel,The Last of the Mohicans, on the Mohican tribe. His description includes some cultural aspects of theMohegan, a different Algonquian tribe that lived in easternConnecticut. Cooper set his novel in the Hudson Valley, Mohican land, but used some Mohegan names for his characters, such asUncas.
The novel has been adapted for the cinema more than a dozen times, the first time in 1920.Michael Mann directed a1992 adaptation, which starredDaniel Day-Lewis as a White man adopted and raised by the Mohican.
This article incorporates text from this source, which is in thepublic domain.
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