Mahican Erotic

The Mahican are the people of the upper Hudson, and their own name says so: Muh-he-con-neok, the people of the waters that are never still, after the tidal river that reverses its flow twice a day as far north as Troy. Their homeland ran along that river from near Lake Champlain south to the Catskills and reached east into the Housatonic valley of Massachusetts and Connecticut. They are not the Mohegan of eastern Connecticut, a separate people with a similar name. James Fenimore Cooper blurred the two in 1826, and the Mahican have spent two centuries correcting a novelist who declared them extinct while they were busy staying alive. Their language belongs to the Eastern Algonquian branch, closest to Munsee to the south and the Algonquian languages of southern New England to the east. The last fluent speakers died in the 1930s, and the tribe is rebuilding it from Moravian and Congregational missionary records. Society was matrilineal and organized by clan, Bear, Wolf and Turtle among them, in villages on river terraces, palisaded when the Mohawk were a threat, which after the Dutch opened Fort Orange in 1624 was often. The fur trade made them middlemen, the Mohawk wanted that position, and a war in the 1620s pushed most Mahican east of the river.

The turn that shaped everything after came in 1734, when a Congregational mission at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, gathered Mahican families into a Christian town where they held office, ran a school and for a time owned the land. They fought for the Continental Army and lost a company of men at Kingsbridge in 1778, then watched their white neighbors take Stockbridge anyway. Under the sachem Hendrick Aupaumut, who wrote a history of his people and served as an American diplomat to the western tribes, they moved among the Oneida in New York, then to Indiana, then to Wisconsin, where they joined with a band of Munsee. The Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians holds a reservation in Shawano County near Bowler, most of it lost to allotment after 1871 and partly rebuilt after the 1930s. The tribe is Christian by long history and still keeps the Stockbridge Bible, a two-volume gift from England in 1745, held in a Massachusetts museum for six decades and returned in 1991. Powwow and clan identity have come back alongside it. Less known is that the tribe never let go of the Hudson. It runs a historic preservation office in the East, has had parcels along the river returned to it in recent years, and its members visit Albany and Stockbridge as people coming home.