STOCKBRIDGE INDIAN SETTLEMENT

STOCKBRIDGE INDIAN SETTLEMENT. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Stockbridge-Munsee band of the Mahican Nation occupied a 46,000-acre reservation in northeastern Wisconsin. Seven hundred of the tribe's fourteen hundred members lived on the reservation, which boasted a health clinic, services for the elderly, a historical museum and library, a golf course, and a casino. The Stockbridge people, formed from an amalgamation of Mahicans, Wappingers, and Housatonics, began their journey to Wisconsin in western Massachusetts during the 1730s, when a small band of Mahicans joined a mission at the town of Stockbridge. Even though the Stockbridges fought for the Americans in the revolutionary war, successive waves of immigrants and land speculators took their territory from them. They moved further and further west, settling in New York, then Indiana, then several locations in Wisconsin, where some Munsee Delawares joined them. The Stockbridge-Munsee band, as this new combination was called, experienced a revival in the 1930s and 1940s, both because of Bureau of Indian Affairs reforms made under John Collier's leadership, and because of an intense sense of community history and identity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davids, Dorothy W. "Stockbridge-Munsee (Mohican)." In Encyclopedia of North American Indians: Native American History, Culture, and Life, from Paleo-Indians to the Present. Edited by Frederick E. Hoxie. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Frazier, Patrick. The Mohicans of Stockbridge. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Treats the eighteenth-century experiences of the Stockbridge people.

Savagian, John C. "The Tribal Reorganization of the Stockbridge-Munsee: Essential Conditions in the Re-Creation of a Native American Community, 1930–1942." Wisconsin Magazine of History 77, no. 1(August 1993): 39–62.

Matthew HoltJennings

See alsoMahican .