Mohicans
Muhhekunneuw | |
|---|---|
| Total population | |
| c. 3,000 | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
 United States (formerly Upstate New York; currently Shawano County, Wisconsin) | |
| Languages | |
| English, formerly Mohican | |
| Religion | |
| Moravian Church | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Lenape, Munsee, Abenaki |
The Mohicans or Mahicans (/moʊˈhiːkənz/ or /məˈhiːkənz/) are an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands who spoke an Eastern Algonquian language. Historically, they were based in Upstate New York. Today, they are enrolled in the federally recognized Stockbridge Munsee Community in Wisconsin.
The Mohicans 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, Massachusetts, 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 reservation 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 enrolled citizens of the Munsee people and a 22,000-acre (89 km2) reservation, which was originally the land of the Menominee people.
Following the disruption of the American Revolutionary War, most of the Mohican descendants first migrated westward to join the Oneida, a Haudenosaunee people, 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 predominantly Haudenosaunee Six Nations of the Grand River reserve.
Territory
[edit]In their own language, the Mohican identified collectively as the Muhhekunneuw, "people of the waters that are never still".[2]
At the time of their first contact with Europeans traders along the river in the 1590s, the Mohican were living in and around the Hudson River (or Mahicannituck). After 1609, at the time of the Dutch settlement of New Netherland, they also ranged along the eastern Mohawk River and the Hoosic River, and south along the Hudson to the Roeliff Jansen Kill,[3] where they bordered on the Wappinger people. This nation inhabited the river area and its interior southward to today's New York City.[4]
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 the