Brothertown Erotic

The Brothertown Indians are a nation founded on purpose rather than inherited. In the 1770s, Christian converts from several Algonquian communities in southern New England and eastern Long Island (Mohegan, Pequot, Narragansett, Montaukett, Niantic and Tunxis) decided their best chance of surviving as Native people was to leave their shrinking land bases and start over together. The name was a statement of intent: a town of brothers, held together by faith, literacy and farming rather than by a single line of descent.

The driving figure was Samson Occom, a Mohegan Presbyterian minister. He had raised money in Britain for Eleazar Wheelock's Indian school, money that ended up building Dartmouth College, and he came home estranged from his old mentor. Occom's son-in-law Joseph Johnson negotiated with the Oneida, who granted the migrants land in central New York. The Revolutionary War stalled the move, and Brothertown, in present-day Oneida County, only took hold in the mid-1780s. It did not stay theirs for long. Land sales, settlers moving in and pressure from New York State pushed the community west in the 1820s and 1830s. They ended up on the eastern shore of Lake Winnebago in Wisconsin, near the Stockbridge-Munsee, who had traveled a similar road.

Wisconsin is where the story takes its strangest turn. In 1839, at the community's request, Congress divided the reservation into individual holdings and made its members United States citizens. They were the first tribe to accept citizenship as a body, and the point was to protect their land from removal. Generations later that same act became the obstacle. When the Brothertown Indian Nation, based in Fond du Lac, asked for federal acknowledgment, the Interior Department concluded in 2012 that the 1839 act had ended the federal relationship and that only Congress could restore it.

Language and faith say a lot about who the founders were. English was already their working language, and their own Eastern Algonquian languages, Mohegan-Pequot and Narragansett among them, were fading before the move. Christianity was the organizing principle of the town: Presbyterian in its New England roots, later largely Methodist in Wisconsin. That church life produced Indian Melodies, an 1845 hymnal by Thomas Commuck, a Brothertown man of Narragansett descent. It is one of the earliest published collections of music by a Native American composer. Today the Brothertown live well beyond Calumet County, holding onto an identity that was chosen deliberately and has had to be defended ever since.