Mahican

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The Mahicans (also Mohicans) are a Native American tribe who were living in and around the Hudson Valley at the time of their first contact with Europeans in 1609. Over the next hundred years, tensions between the Mahicans and the Mohawks as well as the Europeans caused the Mahicans to migrate eastward; many settled in what would eventually become the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. For this reason this group of Mahicans has also frequently been known as the Stockbridge Indians.

The Stockbridge Indians allowed Protestant Christian missionaries to live among them and converted to Christianity in the 18th Century. Although they fought on the side of the American colonists in both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, they were dispossessed of their land and forced to move westward, first to Stockbridge, New York in the 1780s and later to Shawano County, Wisconsin in the 1820s and 1830s. In Wisconsin, they settled on reservations with the Munsee; the two were jointly known as Stockbridge-Munsee.

Today the reservation is known as that of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians.

The now extinct Mahican language belonged to the Eastern Algonquian branch of the Algonquian language family.

James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Last of the Mohicans is based on the Mahican tribe but includes some cultural aspects of the Mohegans, a different Algonquian tribe living in eastern Connecticut. The novel takes place in the Hudson Valley, Mahican land, but some characters' names, such as Uncas, are Mohegan.

External links

Bibliography

Brasser, T. J. (1978). Mahican. In B. G. Trigger (Ed.), Northeast (pp. 198-212). Handbook of North American Indian languages (Vol. 15). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1.
Campbell, Lyle; & Mithun, Marianne (Eds.). (1979). The languages of native America: Historical and comparative assessment. Austin: University of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-74624-5.
Campbell, Lyle; & Mithun, Marianne. (1979). Introduction: North American Indian historical linguistics in current perspective. In L. Campbell & M. Mithun (Eds.), The languages of native America: Historical and comparative assessment (pp. 3-69). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Conkey, Laura E.; Bolissevain, Ethel; & Goddard, Ives. (1978). Indians of southern New England and Long Island: Late period. In B. G. Trigger (Ed.), Northeast (pp. 177-189). Handbook of North American Indian languages (Vol. 15). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
Goddard, Ives. (1978). Eastern Algonquian languages. In B. G. Trigger (Ed.), Northeast (pp. 70-77). Handbook of North American Indian languages (Vol. 15). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
Goddard, Ives. (1979). Comparative Algonquian. In L. Campbell & M. Mithun (Eds.), The languages of native America: Historical and comparative assessment (pp. 70-132). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Goddard, Ives. (1996). Languages. Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 17). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 0-1604-8774-9.
Goddard, Ives. (1999). Native languages and language families of North America (rev. and enlarged ed. with additions and corrections). [Map]. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press (Smithsonian Institute). (Updated version of the map in Goddard 1996). ISBN 0-8032-9271-6.
Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X (pbk).
Salwen, Bert. (1978). Indians of southern New England and Long Island: Early period. In B. G. Trigger (Ed.), Northeast (pp. 160-176). Handbook of North American Indian languages (Vol. 15). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
Simpson, J. A.; & Weiner, E. S. C. (1989). ["Mohican" entry]. Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Online version).
Sturtevant, William C. (Ed.). (1978-present). Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 1-20). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution.
Trigger, Bruce G. (Ed.). (1978). Northeast. Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 15). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution.

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