The Mohicans and the Stockbridge Mohicans

The word "Mohican" in the names of this park and other places in Ohio, reflects the fact that Mohicans were leaving their homeland and moving into the Ohio River Valley as early as the late 1600's.



By 1740 most Mohicans had disappeared from the Hudson River Valley. In fact, many of them had been living in the Ohio River Valley for generations. Over time, these "western" Mohicans intermarried with tribes like the Miami, the Delaware, or possibly with frontier whites. Ultimately, they did not maintain their Mohican identity.


Meanwhile, back in their homeland, the once-mighty Mohican nation was struggling to survive as a result of the changes brought about by over one hundred years of white contact. The fur trade brought about a dependence on white goods, problems with alcohol, an increased competition with other Native nations for resources, bloodier warfare, and, of course, devastating European-imported diseases like smallpox.


So by the 1740's, changes in both the natural environment and the surviving population resulted in the once-mighty Mohican nation being spread out in small, scattered communities.


The history of the Stockbridge Mohicans began when two Mohican villages along the Housatonic River in what is now Massachusetts, decided to accept a Christian mission. The residents of those two villages got more than they bargained for: instead of just teaching a new religion and teaching the children to read, the Indians' British neighbors imposed the structure of white culture upon them. Most notably, the two villages were soon gathered into one town which the British called Stockbridge.


The popularity of Stockbridge, Massachusetts - for both religious and non-religious reasons - made it the Council Fire - in other words, the capital city - of what was left of the Mohican Nation. However, it bears noting that many of the Indians that joined the Stockbridge community were Wappingers or other non-Mohican Indians.

Or were they?

The way some people now use the term "Mohican," anybody who is descended from the Stockbridge Indians is a Mohican, so it doesn't then matter if your ancestors were Naragansetts or some mix of Algonkian-speaking refugees: As long as you are descended from the Indians of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, New Stockbridge, New York, and/or Stockbridge, Wisconsin, you can call yourself a "Mohican."

And why not?

My point is not to prevent a group of people from calling themselves whatever they want, but rather to end the confusion and the talking past one another that often results from cases like this where one word means two different things.


Or do I have it completely wrong?


You tell me.







Sources:


Dunn, Shirley. (2000) The Mohican World, 1680-1750


Frazier, Patrick. (1992) The Mohicans of Stockbridge


Sultzman, Lee. Mahican History
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Menominee Memorial Erected

The Menominees have erected a memorial for their veterans at a park in Keshena.



Click on the photo for a better view:


Let's not forget that when America goes to war, the Native Americans are putting more than their share of young men and women in harm's way.

The Brothertown Nation of Indians - A Highly Recommended Book

Brad Jarvis' recent (2010, University of Nebraska Press) book The Brothertown Nation of Indians: Land Ownership and Nationalism in Early America, 1740-1840, received a very positive review in the April, 2011 issue of Choice Magazine. The reviewer, Lawrence Hauptmann, placed it in the "Highly Recommended" category.

Jarvis also gets a "thumbs up" from me simply for referring to his subjects as the "Brothertowns," instead of the "Brothertons." (Some academics prefer the latter name despite that fact that it is also the name of an entirely different tribe of Christian Algonkians.) Anyway, I also like the fact that Jarvis bothers to deal with the Brothertown Nation's time in what is now Wisconsin instead of just focusing on their days in New York State among the Oneidas.


There is a quote (page 6) in the introduction to Professor Jarvis' book which you may find to ring true with things I've been saying here:

"Christian themes of redemption and self-empowerment also resonated with people marginalized by colonialism."

The Unintended Consequences of Education at Wheelock's School

The University of North Carolina Press recently (2010) published a collection of scholarly writings by various authors under the title Native Americans, Christianity, and the Shaping of the American Religious Landscape. The book includes a chapter by Rachel Wheeler, "Hendrick Aupaumut: Christian Mahican Prophet," and another by David J. Silverman, "To Become a Chosen People: The Missionary Work and Missionary Spirit of the [Brothertown] and Stockbridge Indians, 1775-1835." (Silverman, or, more likely, the editor of the book, likes to spell it "Brotherton," which adds to the confusion over which tribe of Christian Algonkians he is referring to.)

My attention, however, was drawn to a piece called "Print Culture and the Power of Native Literacy in California and New England Missions" by Steven W. Hackel and Hilary E. Wyss (pages 201-224). It was partly about Moor's Charity School which essentially came about after Samson Occom proved to be a particularly successful pupil of Eleazar Wheelock. Rev. Wheelock (pictured here) saw his success with Occom as an opportunity to start a school.

Unfortunately, Wheelock was not one of the truly good missionaries who always had the Indians' own best interests in mind in all of his work. According to Hackel and Wyss, Wheelock believed teaching young Indians to read and write would turn them "into docile figures eager and willing to work under the watchful supervision of white missionaries." However, "none of his students in fact turned out that way"(page 216). Wheelock's attitude could well explain why he took the money Samson Occom raised in Britain to start the historically white institution known as Dartmouth College.

Instead of striving to please Wheelock, their white master, here are some of the things Hackel and Wyss tell us that the student's of Moor's Charity School accomplished with their education:

• Hezekiah Calvin forged a pass for a slave (and was imprisoned for it).




• Samson Occom wrote "petitions for a variety of Native communities."




• Joseph Johnson, after leaving the school, gave up drinking and became a schoolmaster.

And, (also according to Hackel and Wyss, page 218), the Brothertown community itself would not have coalesced without Wheelock's school.

The graphic above is a painting by Joseph Steward (1753-1822). It is kept in the Hood Museum of Art.

The Mohicans of Pachgatgoch: As told by Moravian Missionaries

The diaries of thirteen Moravian missionaries were recently translated (from German) into English. These translated diaries, along with a 73-page introduction, six appendices, and various other sections, were published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2009 under the title Gideon's People: Being a Chronicle of an American Indian Community in Colonial Connecticut and the Moravian Missionaries Who Served There. Corinna Daily-Starna and William A. Starna translated and edited the nearly 700 pages that make up a two volume set.



As far as the blogoshere is concerned, I've been beaten to the punch on this one. A Febrary 19, 2010 post to the Religion in American History blog by Linford D. Fisher was titled "The View from Pachgotgoch (or, Why Moravians Are Still Sexy)".




If Linford Fisher's post wasn't enough to convince you to read all 690-plus pages of Gideon's People, I'll just have to tell you a few other things about it.

Q: Who was Gideon?
A: Gideon was the headman of the village of Pachgatgoch, a unique community in the sense that it was a community of Christian Indians not organized by the missionaries (this is explained in the introduction, page 60).

Q: Is there any data in this book that I can use for genealogy?
A: Any of the Appendices might be helpful to you. they are, as follows:
Appendix 1 --> page 437: Catalogus of the Indian Congregation in Pachgatgoch
Appendix 2 --> page 447: Names Compoiled by Augustus Gottlieb Spangenberg
Appendix 3 --> page 451: Catalogus of Baptized and Unbaptized Indians in Pachgatgoch
Appendix 4 --> page 461: Lists and Correspondence
Appendix 5 --> page 523: Biographical List; and
Appendix 6 --> page 537: the Gazatteer (a list of geographical names)

King Philip's War: One of the Bloodiest in American History

Above: An artist's conception of King Philip's War


According to Daniel Mandell's new book (page 134), King Philip's War was "the bloodiest war in American history in terms of its proportionate effect on a region." Of an estimated population of 80,000 people, almost 9,000 were killed, two-thirds of them were Native Americans. As Mandell tells it (on page 135), the six thousand Indian deaths resulted from combat, disease, and hunger. Furthermore, another two thousand Indians left New England as refugees; and "about one thousand were sold into slavery and certain death in the West Indies."


So, if we can be callous enough to look at the big picture of all of that misfortune, we might say that the upshot of King Philip's War was that Indians became a significantly smaller and weaker minority in New England in a short amount of time.


Nevertheless, as you have seen elsewhere in this blog, Native communities did survive in various ways. And, just as before, religion played a role. According to Mandell, "Christianity became an even more significant aspect of Indian life" after the disastrous war. He specifically mentions the Mohegans, Niantics, Pequots and Narragansetts who "formed their own churches, and developed a host of talented and famous Native preachers." As you may already know, Mandell has the Brothertown Indians in mind when he makes this statement.

King Philip's War by Daniel Mandell

A map of New England in the "Praying Indians" era.

As one of its reviews on Amazon.com states, if you read one book about King Philip's War, it should be Daniel Mandell's. King Philip's War: Colonial Expansion, Native Resistance, and the End of Indian Sovereignty (published by Johns Hopkins in 2010) is both well-researched and readable.

As you might imagine, the thing about it that has interested me the most (so far) came under the heading "Christian Indians." Here are a couple brief excerpts:

The process by which many Wampanoags, Massachusetts, Nipmucs, and Pennacooks embraced the English God and culture was driven by the devasting epidemics and other massive changes to their world. Indians and Puritans similarly believed that the supernatural world worked in everyday occurrences, and both groups saw recent events as evidence that Jehovah had overcome the native gods and that survival required adoption of the English God. Roxbury minister John Eliot stepped into this psychic gap after learning the Massachusett language, preaching that Indians could find salvation by shedding heathenish ways and adopting Puritan disciplines in order to breathe the rarefied Calvinist air (pages 39-40).

...Native converts wore their hair like the English and forswore many old habits, from religious ceremonies, to body greasing, to demonstrate their ability to walk the Christian path of righteousness (page 40).

Mandell also writes of how the first 'praying town' of Natick came about through the partnership of John Eliot with Waban, head of the Massachusett village of Nonantum.

The Munsees in Wisconsin: We'll Keep Trying Until We Get it Right

I have already written a few posts in which I have focused on the Munsee element in the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians now residing in Shawano County, Wisconsin. It is a topic that is so complicated that I am resolved to keep trying until I get it right.



You might say that the Munsees were a 'political football' during the nasty citizen vs. Indian partisanship (and, of course, federal Indian policies of those times tended to encourage that kind of factionalism).




Diplomats in Buckskins (right) shows that The Stockbridge Mohicans weren't the only tribe that sent delegations to Washington asking the government to change their policies.






If you have read James Oberly's A Nation of Statesmen, you have a good idea of how strings were pulled in Washington D.C. for the Indian party when the Republicans were in power and for the Citizen party when the Democrats were in power. The result was a complicated mess of conflicting realities contested between various sub-groups of Indians.

It was an Indian party goal to exclude the Munsees. As a result, members of the Indian party, their lawyers, and other advocates worked to portray the Munsees as outsiders. There certainly was a time when outsiders were welcomed into the Stockbridge community, but you may remember that was stopped with the Quinney Constitution of 1837. (You may also remember that the arrival of a band of Munsees from Canada is one of the events that led John W. Quinney to write that constitution.)

And so we have documents that tell us that there are no Munsees living among the Stockbridge Mohicans. Actually, I think that there were times when the Indian party was largely successful in getting rid of all the other Indians that sought to be part of the tribe. As a result, Indian party documents that claim that few if any Munsees were around might be accurate. I really do have my doubts about the numbers of Munsees that today's Shawano County Indians are descended from. That is a viewpoint that I advanced in a post in my New York Indian removal series in the spring of 2009.

I'm grateful that Jeremy Mohawk submitted a comment to that post recently. Mr. Mohawk stated that he is a descendant of the New York Munsee rolls of 1839 and that (including his wife, three sons and a daughter) his family "still" lives on the Shawano County Reservation. However, I imagine that if we asked Jeremy Mohawk if his Munsee ancestors had ever left the rez, he would admit to gaps of time where they had to leave. He also said "alot of folks up here have Munsee lineage, well most do." As a matter of fact, I have observed that many or perhaps even most tribal members I know personally do claim to be part Munsee. How can we reconcile that with some of the Indian party documents?

Well, we will keep on trying until we get it right. And by "we," I mean that I don't think I can add or change much without the help of further genealogical data from tribal members.

The Mohican Language: Is it Worth it?

I see that Lion Miles' Mohican Dictionary is posted on Debra Winchell's History's Faces blog (look for it in the upper right-hand corner). Just a casual look at the document convinces me that he worked very hard at compiling that dictionary. More than 90 percent of the dictionary is an "English to Mohican" section, with many English words having several Mohican pronounciations.

As a layperson I have only a fuzzy understanding of all the problems involved in compiling a dictionary of a language that was not spoken for several decades as well as being a language that was already changed by white contact by the time people began to interpret or translate it. The result of those (and other) problems is that Lion Miles' dictionary - an attempt at accurately re-creating Mohican - is too complex for ordinary people like you or I to use as a guide in learning Mohican.

But, you know, that is okay. Tribes and independent groups of Indians get together for language camps and that social context is really the best place for adults to learn a language.




Jim Northrup (pictured) organizes the annual Nagaajiwanaang Ojibwe Language Camp in Sawyer, Minnesota.



The language controversy among the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians (if I understand it correctly) is that the Lenape (or Delaware/Munsee) language is being learned along with some Mohican words. For many, including the tribe's Language and Culture Committee, this is good enough. But others feel that the uniqueness of the Mohican language is being kept from being fully realized by that way of teaching.

Rainer Posselt is one tribal member in the latter camp. In his comment to one of my earlier posts he expressed his disappointment that the Language and Culture Committee is essentially teaching Lenape but calling it 'Lenape-Mohican.' As Posselt says, "just tell us it is Lenape, you don't have to lie."

The "York Tribe" in Indiana

<-- Yorktown, Indiana today.












Andy Olson, a reader from Indiana, contacted me a few months ago to tell me about his research of the New York Indians in Indiana. Although he was asking for some help with his project, I have also been able to learn things about the New York Indians from him, most significantly that the allied Brothertown, Stockbridge and Munsee Indians may have stayed in Indiana for longer than historians realize. Back in the 1820's they were known as "the York Tribe" and the modern town of Yorktown, Indiana (located in the Muncie metro area) is named after their settlement. (Of course, "Muncie" is one of the ways that "Munsee" used to be spelled.)

Andy Olson writes that he is part of the Kilgore family which owned a farm just outside of Yorktown from 1825 to 2002. And there was a " Kilgore family legend passed down" in the family that suggested that "David Kilgore [Olson's great, great, great grandfather] made a 'pact' with a departing 'York Indians' chief that neither Kilgore nor any of his descendants would disturb a burial ground on his property."

That is where it began for Andy Olson. He has now read a lot of papers at the Indiana Historical Society.

As you may remember, by the time the Stockbridges and other New York Indians made it to Indiana's White River, that land had already been purchased by the federal government for white settlement. While tribal petitions to re-designate the land did not accomplish their goal, the bureaucrats of the day at least left us with a record of New York Algonkians (men only) that were settled in the White River area as of 1819. This list is provided here courtesy of Andy Olson:

Jonas Littleman, Nicholas Jourdan, David Abrams, Johiakim Youcum, Jonas Thompson, John Littleman, Cornelius Aaron, Jehoiakim Abram, Sampson Pauskemp, Thomas Hickman, James Joshua, Henry Sukhukowrooh, Joseph Pewauqkuewheek, Abram Konnookhauthe, Cornelius Doxstater. David Neesonnuhhuk, John Baldwin, Abram Kauwaukheck, Daniel Aupehiheukum, John P. Konkpot, Aaron Nohsowwaunmut, Absalom Quinney, Isaac Littleman, [and] Sampson Owwohthemmauq.

New York Land Claim Finally Settled

The State of New York finally came to an agreement with the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians. The dispute was over 23,000 acres that the tribe had left behind in the 1820's when they migrated to what is now Wisconsin.

Having succeeded in running a casino on their Shawano County, Wisconsin reservation, the Stockbridge-Munsee are now making plans to build another casino in New York State. For a full account of the historic settlement please see the article on page 1, of Mohican News, "A Ray of Hope."

See Also the Tribal history on page 10

New Book on the Delaware is "Highly Recommended"

Before you go out and purchase Delaware Tribe in a Cherokee Nation, I should point out that its intended audience is not the general public. If you're a history professor or working towards being one, then this book is highly recommended for you. For the rest of us, it may be enough to read this review from Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries (October, 2010 issue, page 364).

In this intriguing, precisely told tale of how the Lenni Lenape (aka "Delaware") became citizens of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, anthropologist [Brice] Obermeyer [the author] constructs the time line of events that led to this situation in his ethnography of a people fighting to hold on to their identity. The "most removed" of Native Americans, the Lenape split into entities on the US and Canada. One group settled on land in the antebellum Cherokee Nation in what is now Oklahoma. In an 1867 document (colloquially called "the agreement"), the tribes agreed that Lenape born in that community thereafter would enjoy full membership in the Cherokee Nation. Problems arose quickly, however, because the Cherokee had not expected the Delaware to retain an ongoing Lenape identity. In the subsequent 150 years, the Delaware have fought for and received federal recognition, only to have it rescinded at the behest of the Cherokee. Since all federal services [must now] come through the Cherokee, the de-organized Lenape can either accept their historic status or do without. Obermeyer's volume details a fascinating and unique case study in intertribal relations and the role of sovereignty in maintenance of tribal identity.

The review, by C.R. Kasee of Winston-Salem University, included a "highly recommended" rating or three of a possible four stars.


Read more about this book on Amazon.com
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