Mingo (tribe)
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See Mingo for other uses of the term.
Tribal Name
Mingo is a distortion of Proto-Eastern Algonquian *me:nkwe:w, an Algonquian name for the Iroquois of unknown etymology. English colonists used the term to describe the Iroquois bands that had migrated to western Pennsylvania and Virginia by 1740.Background
The Mingo people are an Iroquois group that migrated west to the Ohio River Valley in present-day West Virginia in the mid-eighteenth century where they formed their own distinct identity. Their villages were increasingly an amalgamation of Seneca, Wyandot, Shawnee, Susquehannock, and Delaware evacuees. By 1774, the Mingos acted independently of the Iroquois, frequently fighting white settlers while the Six Nations officially advocated peace. Their presence in central and eastern Ohio throughout the 1760s and 1780s especially conflicted with hordes of white settlers who vied with them for control of the region. The Mingos were led by Chief Logan in a series of battles. Despite some pockets of resistance, the Mingos were crushed, and the surviving members of the group mixed with the larger Shawnee and Miami peoples.Other sources say that the Mingos, especially Chief Logan, were very close to the whites. Logan was not actually a chief, but a village leader. His family was murdered, and scalped, by a band of whites. The chiefs of the Six Nations counseled restraint, but acknowledged Logan's right to revenge. Logan exacted his vengeance in a series of raids with only about a dozen followers, not all of whom were Mingos. His vengeance satisfied, he did not even participate in the resulting Lord Dunmore's War, and was probably not at the climactic Battle of Point Pleasant. Rather than participate in the peace conference, he issued Logan's Lament.
By 1830, the Mingos were flourishing in western Ohio improving their farms and establishing schools. Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of that same year, however, forced the Mingos and all natives in Ohio to sell their lands and leave. The United States finally defeated the Mingo nation in 1831 and subsequently forced them to vacate to Kansas in 1832. Upon their removal to Kansas, the Mingos were joined by Seneca bands and both tribes shared the Neosho Reservation there. The tribe moved yet again in 1869 after the American Civil War from the reservation to the southern part of the Neosho tract in present-day Ottawa County, Oklahoma. Today, the tribe numbers over twenty-four hundred members and continues to maintain cultural and religious ties to the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.
Language
The Mingo language (native name: Unyææshæötká') is a Northern Iroquoian language of eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. It is a polysynthetic language with extremely complex verb usage, closely related to Seneca, Onondaga and Cayuga. There has been increasing interest in recent years, especially among Mingo descendants, in revitalizing the language.Mingo County, West Virginia is named for the tribe.
See also
External links
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