MAHICAN

MAHICAN. When Henry Hudson first met the Mahicans in 1609, the Eastern Algonquian-speaking tribe occupied both sides of the Hudson River from Catskill Creek to the mouth of Lake Champlain. By the end of the seventeenth century colonial pressures on their land and conflicts with the Mohawks forced the Mahicans to move eastward into the Berkshire Mountains, where they were joined by other Indians from the lower Hudson Valley. Others moved west to join Oneidas living at Oquaga,

New York, and the Delaware in the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania.

In the 1730s, led by the missionary John Sergeant, they founded a village at Stockbridge, where they remained until the 1780s. During the Revolutionary War, they fought on the side of the colonies; their loyalty was rewarded with the loss of their land at Stockbridge. They then moved to Oneida lands in New York, where they received a ten-mile-square tract. They were joined by a Delaware group from New Jersey called the Brotherton. Here they remained through the first two decades of the nineteenth century, when pressures from the state forced them to sell their lands in New York in violation of the Trade and Intercourse Acts. This time they moved to land held by the Munsee Delaware in Indiana. By the time they arrived, however, the land had been purchased by the United States, and they and the Munsee Delaware moved to the Lake Winnebago area in Wisconsin. There they came to be known as the Stockbridge-Munsee tribe. Their stay in the Lake Winnebago area was short. In 1843, the United States granted the tribal members citizenship and divided the land in severalty. While some of the tribe accepted the act, many refused and eventually were given land in Shawano County, Wisconsin, where they now reside.

The tribe re-established itself and under the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act is federally recognized. The Mahicans are governed by an elected council that administers a 46,080-acre reservation, of which approximately 15,000 acres are in trust.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brasser, T. J. "Mahican" In Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 15: Northeast. Edited by Bruce G. Trigger. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978.

Frazier, Patrick. The Mohicans of Stockbridge. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1992.

JackCampisi

See alsoIndian Trade and Intercourse Act ; Tribes: Northeastern .

Mahican , confederacy of Native North Americans of the Algonquian branch of the Algonquian-Wakashan linguistic stock (see Native American languages ). The Mahican were of the Eastern Woodlands culture area. In the early 17th cent. they occupied both banks of the upper Hudson River extending north almost to Lake Champlain. Living to the northeast were the Pennacook, and to the southwest the Wappinger; both were closely related to the Mahican. The Mohegan were a tribe of the Mahican Confederacy and are to be distinguished from the larger group. However, both groups have on occasion been referred to as Mohicans. When the Dutch arrived in what is now New York the Mohawk had been at war with the Mahican for some time and had steadily driven the Mahican east of the Hudson River. The Mahican council fire, or capital, had been moved (1664) from Schodac, near Albany, eastward to what is now Stockbridge, Mass. The complete subjection and dispersal of the Mahican were hastened by the firearms provided to their enemies by the Dutch. Some of the Mahican moved west to join the Delaware, with whom they afterward moved to the Ohio region (where the Mahican refugees lost their identity). Others placed themselves under the protection of the Iroquois Confederacy in S central New York. Those remaining in Massachusetts joined the Massachusetts Stockbridge; other Mahican descendants live in Connecticut and Wisconsin.

Bibliography: See A. Skinner, Notes on Mahikan Ethnology (1925).

Mahican

The Mahican (River Indians, Canoe Indians), together with the Wappinger, lived along the Hudson River in eastern New York from Lake Champlain to Manhattan Island and eastward to the Housatonic Valley in Massachusetts and the Connecticut River in Connecticut. Descendants of these groups now live on the Stockbridge-Munsee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin and in the Brotherton Indian Community in Winnebago and Calumet counties, Wisconsin. They spoke Algonkian languages. The Stockbridge-Munsee number about one thousand, and the Brotherton Community numbers about three hundred, with the traditional culture and language essentially extinct.

Bibliography

Brasser, T. J. (1978). "Mahican" In Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 15, Northeast, edited by Bruce G. Trigger, 198-212. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.

Mahicans (or Mohicans) A Native American people who inhabited the Hudson River valley. They shared many traits with the IROQUOIS to the west. European contact began when Henry Hudson sailed up the Hudson River in 1609. Beaver and other pelts were exchanged for beads and knives, and regular trade became centred round the Dutch Fort Orange (later Albany). As middlemen for other tribes they jealously kept the Mohawk Iroquois at bay until their control was finally broken in wars of 1662–69. Thereafter epidemics and dispersal by Dutch, then English and American, colonial pressures relegated them to an increasingly lesser role through the 18th century, and, like the DELAWARE, they were eventually officially relocated to midwestern reservations in the 19th century.

Mahican Indians, Algonquian confederacy that originally occupied both banks of the upper Hudson River. Crowded by the white settlements, the Mahicans moved to Pennsylvania and thence with the Delawares to the Ohio region, where they were dispersed. The only Mahicans who have preserved the tribal identity are the Stockbridge Indians. In The Last of the Mohicans Cooper confuses Mahicans with Mohegans, with whom they were closely affiliated.

Ma·hi·can / məˈhēkən/ (also Mo·hi·can) • n. 1. a member of an American Indian people formerly inhabiting the Upper Hudson Valley in New York. Compare with Mohegan. 2. the Algonquian language of this people. • adj. of or relating to the Mahicans or their language.