Mohicans

Mohicans
Muhhekunneuw

Historical territory of the Mohicans
Total population
c. 3,000
Regions with significant populations
United States (Shawano County, Wisconsin)
Languages
English, formerly Mohican
Religion
Moravian Church
Related ethnic groups
Lenape, Munsee, Abenaki

The Mohicans (/moʊˈhiːkənz/ or /məˈhiːkənz/) are an Eastern Algonquian Native American tribe that historically spoke an Algonquian language. As part of the Eastern Algonquian family of tribes, they are related to the neighboring Lenape, whose indigenous territory was to the south as far as the Atlantic coast. The Mohican lived in the upper tidal Hudson River Valley, including the confluence of the Mohawk River (where present-day Albany, New York, developed) and into western New England centered on the upper Housatonic River watershed. After 1680, due to conflicts with the powerful Mohawk to the west during the Beaver Wars, many were driven southeastward across the present-day Massachusetts western border and the Taconic Mountains to Berkshire County around Stockbridge, 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 became Shawano County, Wisconsin. Most eastern Native American populations were forced to reservations in Indian Territory during the 1830s, and other reservations in the American West later. Decades later the United States government organized the Stockbridge-Munsee Community with registered members of the Munsee people and a 22,000-acre (89 km²) reservation, which was originally the land of the Menominee Nation.

Following the disruption of the American Revolutionary War, most of the Mohican descendants first migrated westward to join the Iroquois Oneida 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 northeastern Wisconsin under the federal Indian Removal Act.^[1] A group of Mohican also migrated to Ontario, Canada to live with the predominately Iroquois Six 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 word Muh-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 River Mahicanuck, or the river with waters that are never still.^[3] Therefore, they, along with other tribes living along the Hudson River (such as the Munsee to their west, known by the dialect of Lenape that they spoke, and Wappinger) 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 as Mohican, in a transliteration to their own spelling system. The French, adopting names used by their Indian allies in Canada, knew the Mohican as the Loups (or wolves). They referred to the Iroquois 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 the Lenape people, who occupied coastal areas from western Long Island to the Delaware River valley to the south.

In the late twentieth century, the Mohican joined other former New York tribes, including the Oneida 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 governor David Paterson announced a land exchange with the Stockbridge-Munsee that would enable them to build a large casino on 330 acres (130 ha) in Sullivan County in the Catskills, as a settlement in exchange for dropping their larger claim in Madison County. The deal had many opponents.