Native Languages of the Americas: Mohican (Mahican, Stockbridge, Wappinger)
Language: The two Algonkian languages
Mahican and Mohegan are related
and have similar-sounding names, but they are linguistically distinct from each other, like Spanish and Italian.
A third language, Narragansett, may have been
distinct or may have been a dialect of Mohegan or Massachusett.
The language spoken by the Wappinger tribe is considered a Mohican dialect by many linguists, but it may have
been more closely related to Lenape.
Unfortunately the point is moot, for none of these languages has been spoken since the early 20th century.
People: The general term "Mohican" has been used to refer not only to the Mahicans and their kin the Wappingers,
but also to six or seven other Indian tribes lumped together as Mohegans
by early colonists. The confusion between these eastern tribes was worsened by James Fenimore Cooper's book "Last of the Mohicans," which
incorrectly merged the Mahicans and Mohegans into a single, extinct Mohican tribe. In reality the Mahicans and Mohegans have never been the same
tribe, and neither group is extinct. (Cooper may have been thinking of the Wappingers, who really had been destroyed as a distinct people
by the time he wrote his book--the survivors were mostly absorbed into the Mahican tribe, where their descendents remain today.) The
similarity between their names is due to coincidence and European mispronunciation--"Mahican" comes from the word
Muheconneok, "from the waters that are never still" (the Hudson River), and "Mohegan" comes from the word Mahiingan, "wolf."
Today there are about 3000 Mahican Indians in Wisconsin, where they were forced to emigrate, and many Mahican descendents scattered
throughout New England.
History: The Mahicans, or Mohicans, were original natives of what is now New York state, along the banks of the Hudson
River. Like most Indian tribes of New England, the Mohicans were devastated by warfare
and European diseases during the early colonial period, then forced to leave their homelands by Dutch and British expansion.
Some Mohicans sought refuge with neighboring tribes, including the Lenape
and the Iroquois, but most resettled in Stockbridge, Massachusetts,
where they came to be known as the Stockbridge Indian tribe. Soon the Stockbridge Mohicans were deported once again to Wisconsin, where they joined the
Munsee Indians on a jointly held reservation. The Munsee and Mohican tribes remain together
there to this day.