One More Time: The Munsee Indians in Wisconsin[?]

This map is from the official site of the Delaware Tribe of Indians.

As discussed earlier, the people that I call the Stockbridge Mohicans have a number of other names. Their 1939 constitution gave them the handle "The Stockbridge-Munsee Community."

For a while I was telling my white friends that I was researching the history of the "Stockbridge-Munsee Indians." As a result, they completely missed the point that the tribe identifies mostly with being Mohican. You can be both Mohican and something else, but if you're talking to somebody, does that person (or persons) give you enough time to say "Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians? The answer is no. So you shorten the name, and "Stockbridge Mohicans" works for me.

In my research I've come across a lot of sources that say things about "the Munsees" and certainly there were still groups of Munsees that stayed together after the Lenape or Delaware Indians had been pushed out of their homeland. One of the Munsee groups that stuck together became guests of the Stockbridge Mohicans (from 1837 to 1839) at Stockbridge, Wisconsin. But many of the Munsees didn't stick together. Many generations ago, a large portion of the  Munsees had already begun to disperse across the face of Turtle Island, often marrying into other tribes.

I won't make the claim that no Munsees joined the Stockbridge Mohicans in the 1800's, of course some did. Big Deer is one. John Killsnake is another. And the Mohawk family, they were Munsees and my guess is they took on the name "Mohawk" because they had been living among Mohawks in New York before coming to Wisconsin.

But if the word "Munsee" deserves to be in the tribe's name at all - and I questioned that in Proud and Determined - it is for two reasons, 1) the Munsees and the Mohicans intermarried a lot starting at about 1670, and 2) about two hundred Wappinger Munsees moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts during the French and Indian War. But the Mohicans didn't change the name then. The "Munsee" part of the tribe's name was added by the United States federal government in the next century - that is something for another blogpost entirely.

Anyway, Robert Grumet's The Munsee Indians gives us a lot of insight into the consequences of the Munsees being mixed-in with various other tribes.

The need to choose one's nationality after marriage made things even more difficult for Munsees living in multicultural communities after 1767.... Decisions to adopt spouse's nationalities played major roles in turning many Munsee family names into surnames later primarily found in other Indian communities. The Munsee Nimham family name, for example, gradually became the prominent Oneida Ninham surname after Munsee Nimham men loosened from the ties of their matrilineages adopted the nationalities of their Oneida wives (pages 274-275).

Probably another family that is in a similar situation is the Metoxens. Maybe you know some other examples?

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