Migrations of Native Christian Communities Recorded by W. DeLoss Love

[caption id="attachment_9101" align="aligncenter" width="300"] The red dot is the location of the Brothertown Reservation in the 1830's.[/caption]

W. DeLoss Love's 1899 book, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England, is, of course more than just a biography. It is still one of the best places to go for the history of the Brothertown Indians. Plus, chapter XIII is called "Indian Friends at Stockbridge." It bears repeating here that the Brothertown Indians had started their settlement in New York State prior to the Revolutionary War, but, finding that location to be unsafe, they retreated to West Stockbridge, Massachusetts for six years. According to Love (page 243), it was the friendships formed during those years that resulted in the Stockbridge Mohicans becoming neighbors with the Brothertown and  Oneida Indians in New York State starting in the 1780's. (As you may know, the move for the Stockbridges was necessary, because they had lost their land - much of it in fraudulent ways.)

Love correctly notes that some of the Stockbridge Mohicans moved to Indiana in 1818.

At this time they began to sell their lands, and this continued until they were all established again beside their friends, the Brothertown Indians, on the east side of Winnebago Lake, in Wisconsin (page 245).

Chapter XXVII, The Last Remove, discusses that in much more detail. On pages 316-317 Love describes the New York Indians' attempted move to Indiana's White River.

It had been determined at Brothertown in 1812 to begin a settlement at White River. [War] deterred them, and many of their number enlisted in the United States service. Some never returned. Finally, when peace had been restored, the town voted, January 13, 1817, to choose five men to go there "in pursuit of a tract of land heretofore sought for by their delegates sent there in the year 1809, and to get a title to it." The Stockbridge tribe also were preparing to remove. Two families went in 1817 and more the next season. On the twenty-fourth of July, 1818, Rev. John Sergeant assembled the tribe in anticipation of this pilgrimage. the old church then dismissed and formed into a new body eleven of their number, for whom he transcribed the Confession of Faith and Covenant in English, adding in their own language a Covenant especially adapted to their circumstances. On the fifteenth of August following, some having gone and more being then ready to depart, another meeting was held, at which the chief, Hendrick Aupaumut, in a "large speech" presented to them from the old church a copy of Scott's Bible "to read on Lord's Days and at other religious meetings." So they said farewell and were gone to return no more.

Lion Miles Rips on of William Starna's "From Homeland to New Land"

When I was putting the finishing touches on my own book about the Stockbridge Mohicans (it covers the years 1734 to 2014), I became aware of another book that deals with essentially the same people. The author prefers to call them Mahicans (more on that later) and his book covers the tribe from 1600 until their removal to present-day Wisconsin.

Admittedly, I myself have yet to read From Homeland to New Land, A History of the Mahican Indians, 1600-1830, by anthropologist William Starna. But - believe me - enough information is available on the book to justify a  blogpost.

In particular, I'm referring to a rather nasty review of Starna's book that Lion Miles posted on Amazon a few months ago. This is one of those critiques that, when you first read it, you are impressed and almost ready to dismiss the book which is being criticized. But William Starna wisely disregarded the advice that authors should always ignore bad reviews. Starna fought back, responding to every detailed criticism coming from Miles. And he adds a somewhat personal criticism: "Readers may be interested to learn that this is not the first time that Miles has taken wild swings at my work."

On specific points, I doubt that either scholar is completely correct. Both are experts on a tribe that is undergoing rapid change, first with the fur trade and later with missionization, not to mention a series of wars and other tensions. The result of that change - and the fact that much of the data is secondhand -means that the surviving data on these Indians and their neighbors has inconsistencies. I believe that the identifying and disentangling of these inconsistencies is a very important skill in historical scholarship.

In a perfect world, Starna and Miles would have gotten together as friends and disentangled the inconsistencies they found in the data they gathered. Instead, they butted heads and future scholars will be left to follow their bread crumbs to historical truth. I am interested in giving William Starna's book a chance. I'll probably want to give it more than the two stars it got from Lion Miles.

( By the way, Proud and Determined, the book I wrote about the Stockbridge Mohicans, has been favorably reviewed, both on Amazon and Goodreads. )

One of the things that Miles and Starna clashed on is the name of the people they were dealing with. Starna uses the term "Mahicans," while Miles insists on "Mohicans." Let's find out their reasons.

According to Lion Miles:

The first error is the use of the spelling “Mahican” in the title. That spelling was used almost exclusively by Europeans in the 17th century. When members of the tribe learned to write, they adopted the spelling “Mohican” and that has been the accepted usage for the past 200 years.

Starna responds:

On the "error" Miles claims was committed in using "Mahican" in the title: The etymology and historical application of "Mahican" is fully discussed in the book's introduction, including the reasons for employing the term throughout as a linguistic rather than a cultural designation. Miles either didn't read or chose to ignore that discussion.

The argument, of course, is entirely academic. The descendants of the Indians in question - the real people that are living and breathing today - use "Mohican," not "Mahican."

 

 

 

Sedgwick & Marquand's "Stockbridge 1739-1974": Biases in Chapter One

[caption id="attachment_7297" align="alignright" width="153"] An early printing of Stockbridge 1739-1974: A Chronicle, as it appeared on ebay recently[/caption]

There is quite a bit of racial bias in Sarah Cabot Sedgwick and Christina Sedgwick Marquand's Stockbridge, 1734-1974: A Chronicle. So I've ignored it until now. However, Stock-Mo-History wishes to leave no stone unturned. Let's see what this book says and if there are unfair biases, let's call the authors out on them.

 

Page 2: Konkapot was "a man of stalwart character, but limited brain power."

Certainly an undeserved insult. An assumption that is not backed up.

 

Page 4:

Questioned more specifically about the Indians' religious beliefs, Ebenezer was vague. Some believed God to be the sun; some that the sun was the habitation of God; others were professed atheists, believing that all things began, continued and ceased, according to the laws of their natures without any direction from an outside power.

That was paraphrased from somewhere. I've been trying to locate the original quote myself in recent months. The bias in that statement is not racial, but in the original quote, it was emphasized that some of the Indians believed in one God, just like the whites.

 

Page 14: I'm not an anthropologist, so I cannot claim to know exactly how nomadic the Indians were prior to 1734, but the authors seem to think they know, and it sounds overly romantic to me:

They [the Mohicans] roamed as naturally as deer through the forest. A wigwam was taken down in ten minutes and they were gone, leaving no trace behind them.

 

Page 17: In describing the ordination of John Sergeant, we get this:

All the protagonists in the struggle between the Indians and English were represented in the meetinghouse at Deerfield that day and the hopeless division between the two races was shown up in a series of dramatic contrasts. some of these contrasts were quite deliberate. The showy paint and feathers and gay blankets of the Six Nations [Mohawks and other Iroquois had their own reasons for being present] were a definite indication to the English of the arrogance of the Indians in the wily game they were playing between the English and the French. The English, on their side, were doing everything in the way of full regimentals in scarlet and gold to impress the Six Nations with what a powerful hand they held in thins game.

I think I'd re-frame that and emphasize that there was a big struggle between the English and the French for world domination back then. The Indians "wily game" was, understandably, the things they had to do to maintain trading partnerships with European powers, while, at the same time, working on their own survival, something that isn't arrogant in my opinion.

 

Page 18: Jehoiakim Van Valkenburgh, a Dutch trader, is known to have been a very good friend of Konkapot. but he was a trader. And we know what traders did, right? Most of them cheated the Indians. Alcohol was one of their tools. But for Van Valkenburgh to have been a good friend of Konkapot, I'd suspect that he was one of the few ethically-minded traders.

Sedgwick and Marquand lump Van Valkenburgh with the other unscrupulous traders. Their conclusion that Van Valkenburgh controlled the Housatonic Mohicans with alcohol, rests on their assumption that Konkapot had "limited brainpower" (see above). (In other words, Konkapot needs to be lacking in brains for our authors, otherwise, he'd have been able to see how evil his friend Van Valkenburgh was.)

On page 22, Van Valkenburgh is described as "a veritable Satan."

 

So, if, as Sedgwick and Marquand have it, Van Valkenburg, the close friend of Konkapot, is the bad white man, guess who their white hero is in the first chapter? Not John Sergeant. Although they have nothing bad to say about Sergeant, their story about Stockbridge, Massachusetts only moves forward when the focus of the mission town changes. It was Ephraim Williams who made the changes in a way that those with a capitalist mindset could find admirable.

Their description of Ephraim Williams is on pages 22-23:

Williams was the typical, hard-headed pioneer who carves his way through forests, builds roads, throws out bridges and in the process rolls up for himself a handsome fortune.... [He] arrived in 1737, with...various schemes in his head for becoming a large frog in a small pond.

They don't mention that none of Williams' schemes had anything to do with the town's original mission. (To not condemn Williams comes across to me as something like approval.)

To Sedgwick and Marquand, Ephraim Williams had the support of the English ministers who had set up the mission. This may have been true at the beginning, after all Ephraim Williams' daughter Abigail married John Sergeant.

But the thing that moved the town forward into chapter two of the book was Ephraim Williams' decision to get Van Valkenburgh, the Dutch trader, out of the way. Acting on Williams' proposal, the English bought out Van Valkenburgh and his 290 acres (page 23).

I doubt that any legitimate historian claims to know much about Jehoiakim Van Valkenburgh. On the other hand, historians like Lion Miles and Patrick Frazier have shown us conclusively that Ephraim Williams was a real villain. Maybe it isn't a good idea to put all the blame for the Indians getting dispossessed of their mission town on one person. But there is no question who that one person would be.

 

Non-Indians of Stockbridge, MA: Josiah Jones

In 1730 Jonathan Belcher, the Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, conceived the notion of an "Indian Town" where just a few white families would live. The idea was that, in addition to a minister and a teacher; tradesmen and housewives would also demonstrate "civilized" Christian living to a predominantly Native community. The previous "praying towns" of New England had not been integrated that way and as a result, those early Christian Indians were vulnerable to attacks from both whites and Indians.

Belcher's plan appears to have worked for about three years. But when Ephraim Williams moved his family to Indian Town it was the beginning of the end. At Williams' urging, "Indian Town" became incorporated as "Stockbridge" in 1739. The incorporation of the town (including the name change that went with it) was just one of many steps towards a segregated and secular town. And segregation and secular goals (also known as prosperity and/or greed) were exactly what pushed the Stockbridge Mohicans out of town after about fifty years.

I understand that Indians lost their land to whites over and over across the course of American history. But a good historian will tell you that just because something happened doesn't mean that it had to happen.

This is where Josiah Jones comes in. Jones and his wife, Anna, were two of the very first whites to settle at Indian Town and they really were the kind of pious Christians that Governor Belcher had in mind when he conceived his plan. As Electa Jones (probably not a relative) puts it in Stockbridge, Past and Present (149), Josiah Jones

learned the Indian language and was long remembered by a few of their tribe. They always spoke of him as "Good man, always kind to Indian."

He was in his early thirties when he first came to Indian Town. And we know that Josiah Jones lived into his eighties because he was still around when the poor Indians - dispossessed of their land - knew it was time to leave the town that was set up for their benefit.

[caption id="attachment_7052" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Josiah and Anna Jones had a son whose name was also Josiah, and this is the son's gravestone.[/caption]

When the tribe left Stockbridge, they presented him, as a token of their affection, the Old Conch Shell which had always been used to summon them to their place of worship, and also a beautiful belt of wampum (Jones, 149).

Josiah Jones and his family appear to have been exceptionally "good" people. But Ephraim Williams and his family seem to have been exceptionally "bad" people.  I often think of the overall failure of the mission at Stockbridge, Massachusetts as a triumph of bad over good. What do you think?

 

How the Housatonic Mohicans Opened the Door to the Stockbridge Mission

Two of my recent posts, spirituality and Reactions to the Hard Times Brought on by White Contact and Death of the Spirit: How did the Eastern Woodland Indians Lose their Traditional Religion? were written in general or abstract terms. But even as I was writing them, I was trying to locate a quote that describes the Mohicans on the Housatonic River in 1734 as having a variety of religious beliefs. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find that quote.

The title of one of my two recent posts borrowed the phrase "Death of the Spirit" from a chapter title in Patrick Frazier's The Mohicans of Stockbridge. The phrase is simply a poetic way of saying that the Mohican religion was no longer intact after 125 years of white contact.

Maybe this should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway: the disasters of the fur trade didn't damage the Mohicans' need for spirituality. (Otherwise why would they have ever accepted a new religion?) Instead, the fur trade irreparably damaged the Mohicans' orally transmitted system of rituals and beliefs.

Konkapot and Umpachenee, the chiefs of the two Housatonic villages, were approached by the British with the offer of a Christian mission. The proposal was discussed and debated in council in July of 1734.

It was not a decision that the residents of the two villages took lightly. The council lasted four days! And the winning argument - coming down on the side in favor of Christianity - was made by Poohpoonuc. When translated into English (by Nathaniel Appleton, see bibliography below), Poohpoonuc's argument sounded like this:

Since my remembrance, there were ten Indians where now there is one. But the Christians greatly increase and multiply and spread across the land. Let us therefore leave our former courses and become Christians.

Does that sound like a religious statement to you? Maybe not, but it is a religious statement in the context of the things Gregory Evans Dowd wrote about on page 19 of A Spirited Resistance. Dowd said that Indians were trying to understand the disasters they endured in the context of sacred power. And some Indians decided that there was more sacred power in Christianity. This explains why the Housatonic Mohicans accepted a Christian mission. But it also explains more. A lot more.

By 1737 the Mohicans had a missionary that was preaching in their own language and, according to Patrick Frazier (page 37), Indians came "from near and far" to listen to the sermons and "witness the new Indian life." Some of those visiting Indians permanently joined the tribe. For that reason, (and others) I continue to believe that Christianity was an essential element in the history of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians.

 

Printed Sources:

Appleton, Nathaniel. Gospel ministers Must be Fit for the Master's Use. (An ordination sermon, printed by S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1735.)

Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Frazier, Patrick. The Mohicans of Stockbridge Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

 
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A Map of the Stockbridge Mohicans' "Trail of Tears"

[caption id="attachment_999" align="aligncenter" width="604"] This map outlines the migrations of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians. Click on the image to enlarge it.[/caption]

 

Above is my best visual representation of the Stockbridge Mohicans' "Trail of Tears," and the only reason that I put that in quotation marks is because the phrase has long been associated with removals of the southeastern Native nations. If you've read my book, Proud and Determined, you already know that the people now known as the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians endured many, many years of hard times. And their migrations were an essential part of those hard times.

Many of the migrations don't have an exact date, instead, they happened over a range of years. Below is a summary of the Trail of Tears of the Stockbridge Mohicans:

 

The tribe started leaving Massachusetts in 1785 and that move was two-thirds complete by 1787. They made a treaty with the Menominees and Ho-Chunk (sometimes known as the Winnebago Indians) in 1821 and another one in 1822 (which will be the subject of an upcoming blogpost). One band, led by John Metoxen, left New Stockbridge, New York in 1818, but, by the time they reached their destination, Indiana's White River, they were told that the land had been sold by the Delaware, Miami and other tribes.

Although the Metoxen band did their best to establish farms on the White River for about four years, they could not stay and in 1822 they headed up to Detroit. There they met up with about twenty of their tribesmen who had taken a steamship, the Walk-in-the-Water, from Buffalo. This larger band landed in Green Bay and made their way up the Fox River, settling Statesburg, which is now the south part of Kaukauna, Wisconsin. The long migration had really only started in 1822. Several bands made their own separate moves from New Stockbridge, New York to Statesburg between 1822 and 1829.

The treaties that were made in 1821 and 1822 were not well-thought-out and, understandably, the Menominee Indians put up a protest against them. For quite a few years the United States tried to get the Menominees and the New York Indians to make some kind of agreement or compromise regarding the two sloppily created treaties. The end result was that the Stockbridges had to move again. Their next home was on the east shore of Lake Winnebago, not particularly far south of Statesburg.

The move from Statesburg to their next settlement, known as Stockbridge, Wisconsin was made in 1834 and 1835. A number of sources will confirm this, the one that I have to share with you now is from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, or ABCFM, the ABCFM received very detailed reports from Rev. Cutting Marsh, several times a year (we get the ABCFM's report here via Roger Nichols' biography of Rev. Cutting Marsh).



 

It goes without saying that each time Indians were told that they would have to move it was a disincentive for clearing land for farming. Unfortunately, in this brief summary, there is little space to go into any detail other than the "wheres" and "whens" of each move.

Something I intentionally left out of the map was the 1839 departure of less than one hundred Indians from Stockbridge, Wisconsin to what is now Kansas. This "Emmigrant Party," was made up of members of the Hendrick family, the Konkapot family and the Brotherton Delawares, a group of Natives who sold their reservation in New Jersey and moved to New Stockbridge, New York in 1802 (or, possibly 1803).

Two townships were purchased from the Menominees and those two twonships became the Stockbridge Mohicans' reservation per an 1856 treaty. The Citizen Party began moving to the Shawano County Reservation within months of having thedetails worked out. On the other hand, many of the Indian Party Stockbridges protested the tereaty of 1856, some of them not moving until 1860. In fact, given that the soil of the new reservation was poor for farming, many Indians would be "absentees" from the rez for many years.

Arguably, the tribe still had more moving to do. But, for the sake of simplicity, I'll just say that the current reservation of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians exists on the same two townships in Shawano County that the Citizen Party started moving to in 1856.

My thanks to Bart Putzer from Bart Putzer Design, for creating the graphics for the map in this post.

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April 17, 2014 - Note: I want to acknowledge here that the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee has their own map - which I have seen but didn't use as a source. (They also used the title "....Trail of Tears.") If their map shows the same places, routes and dates (and I really don't know if it does or not), it only means that my research agrees with theirs.

From Stockbridge, Massachusetts to...not only New Stockbridge, New York

Pictured above: The Berkshire mountains (hills) of western Massachusetts.

The Munsee Indians by Robert Grumet covers a people who had - to a large extent - intermarried with other tribes by the end of the Revolutionary War. It seems the Munsees were most likely to mix-in with Mohicans (Mahicans) and other scattered Algonquian-speaking people. So I was not surprised that Gromet appears to do as good a job of anybody in following the Stockbridge Mohicans from their town in Massachusetts to their next home, which, he points out, wasn't New Stockbridge, New York for everybody.

Some Stockbridgers also moved north to the Abenaki town of St. Francis Odanak. A few trekked west to join with the Delaware Indian main body in Ohio. Family traditions also affirm that a small number of families refusing to leave settled in remote hollows in the mountainous country about Stockbridge [Mass.] (page 279).

It shouldn't really surprise us that the make-up of a tribe would change somewhat with each migration. To some extent, it also explains how the "people of many trails" came to be made up of many tribes.

I was surprised that Grumet doesn't cover the Gnadenhutten Massacre. I'm saving that shameful event in American history for a later post, but I hoped that Grumet would at least mention it and weigh in on the somewhat controversial issue of whether the victims at Gnadenhutten were Delawares or Mohicans. Nevertheless, the tone of the whole book suggests that by 1782, the Munsee Delawares were so inter-married with other tribes that it might be pointless for him to argue whether they were Mohicans or Delawares: they must have been both.

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Stockbridge Chiefs and Matrilineality

April 14, 2014.
Bloggers' note: Yesterday Robert Shubinsky made a comment in response to this post (originally blogged last month) and his comment is so important that I'm going to quote it here and ask you to read it before you read my original blogpost:

I was reading the book ‘Samson Occom and the Christian Indians’ and it states that in 1777 Joseph Quanaukaunt or Quinney became sachem.
His three councilors were Peter Pauquaunaupeet son of Peter the 1st deacon of same name, Hendrick Aupaumut and lastly John Konkapot also called John Stockbridge. Joseph was the son of King Ben’s granddaughter and a brother in law to Hendrick Aupaumut who was married to Lydia Quinney.

And here also is my response:

Thanks for your comment Bob.

[The] more complicated “line of chiefs,” [that you get when you add Joseph Quanaukaunt] is evidence that matrilineality continued to a large extent after the Stockbridge mission was founded.

Admittedly, I had an abbreviated list of chiefs. I’d been aware of that passage that you mention, but forgot where it was. History has largely forgotten Joseph Quanaukaunt and I’m sorry that I had also forgotten his place in the order.

At the same time, I appreciate your comment because it bolsters one of the [important] points that I made in the post: the point that the Christian church should not be blamed for coercing matrilineality out of the Stockbridge Mohicans.

I decided not to scrap this post entirely. It may still be considered a worthwhile read, if you keep in mind that the chiefs who - in my own 21st century opinion - were important in history were the ones that I mentioned in the post. Their Christian names (easier for me to spell and type) were Ben, Solomon, and Hendrick. The one that I left out, Joseph Quanaukaunt, in spite of whatever remarkable and good qualities he may have had as a leader or otherwise, might have been wiped off the historical record save for the mention he gets as once being the head chief.

Another thing that has come to mind is that I once attended the Algonquain Peoples' Conference in Albany, New York where I listened to various experts talk about a number of things. One said that Konkapot was the head chief at Stockbridge, MA and another said that Umpachenee was the head chief at Stockbridge, MA. I bring that up here to make the point that not all sources are in agreement about everything. Bob Shubinsky was kind enough to give me/us the source he had used. I think I was using Stockbridge Past and Present by Electa Jones, plus my own memory which, of course, is fallible. Anyway, Thanks again for your input Bob!

 

What follows is my original and unedited blogpost:


Pictured above: Schematic diagram of Cherokee kinship system and British royal succession, both of which are matrilineal --> Source: https://hiddencause.wordpress.com/2011/02/

 

What began - for me -  as a list of who was the head chief of the Stockbridge Mohicans, became a discussion of how one chief succeeded another.

 

"King Ben" Kokhkewaunaunt served for at least thirty years, resigning in 1771. He passed the title of big chief on to his son, Solomon Uhhaunauwaunmut. As I understand it, prior to white contact, clan mothers would pick the new chief from the nephews of the old chief - in other words, the clan mothers would pick one of their sons.

The previous sentence is my understanding of matrilineal succession, maybe my explanation or definition of it isn't exactly correct, if it isn't, please let me know. If anybody can add anything to that it would be appreciated. Nevertheless, prior to the Christian era, the Mohicans did not keep written records. So how do we know for sure exactly how things were done? I think the closest we can come is to call it "matrilineal succession" which may have some variations. But seriously, if you know more than that please comment.

But by the time written records were kept, Stockbridge Mohican chiefs were chosen via patrilineal succession, or something close to it.

Leadership went from "King Ben" to his son Solomon Uhhaunauwaunmut and then on to his son, Hendrick Aupaumut and again on to Captain Hendrick's son, Solomon U. Hendricks, whose untimely death - and other factors - appear to have disrupted the string.

I have the impression that Shirley Dunn, author of The Mohican World, and some of the tribe's female elders think that patrilineal succession was imposed or "forced upon" the Stockbridge Mohicans. But, in my view, it was something that the men in the tribe welcomed - maybe they borrowed it from the whites, but I think they borrowed it willingly. Why else would "King Ben" name his son "Solomon"?

I know. That raises other questions. 1) Did Indians call him "King Ben" or just whites? I imagine that Indians only called him by his Indian name, but I don't think that matters at all in this particular discussion. 2) Did "King Ben" have enough knowledge of the Bible to be making a point by naming his son "Solomon'? A good question, arguably a relevant one  to this discussion, but even if he had to be told who "King Solomon" was in the Bible, the fact that he and his wife still named their son "Solomon," at least suggests that they wanted the symbolism that went with the name of a great monarch who was, in turn, the son of another great monarch. 3) Who gave the Indians their Christian names? Answer: Christian parents could pick a Christian name for their Christian infants. Adults who were baptized could pick a Christian name. Those who weren't baptized used only their Indian names unless (or until) they felt they needed an English name.

Anyway, maybe patrilineal succession was different from how things were before, but Indians were already making lots of changes. Not all of those changes were made against their will. I don't think there is anything immoral or "un-Indian" about a chief who wants his son to take his place - unless you want to make the point that women should have as much a chance of taking political leadership as men. Okay, let's take a look at that.

I've read about how the Iroquois had some kind of balance of power between the sexes that continued to some extent into historical times. And maybe the Algonquian-speaking Native nations also had some kind of system that balanced power between genders. (Maybe matrilineality itself was that system.)  However, by the time the Mohicans welcomed a mission into their midst, whatever balance of power between genders there might have once been was already gone. So if there ever was an Algonquian balance of power it was wiped out by the fur trade, not by missionaries.

 

Please use the link below to comment here - I've gotten rid of the old plug-in that made commenting difficult for many of you.

 

Sources include Electa Jones' Stockbridge Past and Present, as well as other sources, including what we might call common knowledge.
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Christianity: The Ingredient that Changed the Mohicans into the Stockbridge Mohicans

In my last post I defined ethnogenesis as the creation of an ethnic group.

I expected to get some objection from my Indian audience for stating that I believe the Mohican Indians underwent an ethnogenesis as their Massachusetts mission town took shape. Although you see no comments posted here, I did get some argument on Facebook, especially from Shawn Stevens. And let me tell you that Shawn is one of a small number of people whose support is part of what makes my research and writing worthwhile. Shawn's response to my last post was long (for facebook) and it included some exclamation marks.

Since I make it a point to keep my blogposts relatively brief, I didn't have enough space to make my argument completely clear in my previous post so I will fill it out here. The essence of my argument is that the Stockbridge Mohicans are different from the pre-Christian-era Mohicans because of religion. The American Heritage Dictionary defines ethnic as "of or relating to a specific group of people sharing a common and distinctive racial, national, religious, linguistic, or cultural heritage." So one's ethnic group can be defined by race or "blood quantum," but it can also be defined by religion and culture.

In my previous post I stated that John Sergeant baptized 182 Indians "at a time when baptism was a rather exclusive rite among Calvinists." I noted that many of the converts were not "Mohicans" and, for that reason, it is understandable that some people (Shawn Stevens included) thought that I was making a "blood quantum" argument. Instead, I was arguing that being a Stockbridge Mohican was different from being any other kind of Mohican because they [the Stockbridges] had taken on a different religion and culture.

Those "other kinds" of Mohicans didn't survive as distinct ethnic groups. But the Stockbridge Mohicans are with us today. That is a paraphrase of something that Captain Hendrick Aupaumut said in a speech to the White River Delawares in 1803. The Stockbridge chief was encouraging the Delawares to accept a Christian mission and the things that went with it, primarily learning to farm and learning to read.

Please don't misunderstand me. I myself have documented the hard times of the Stockbridge Mohicans. And I would guess that they are among only a small minority of tribes who (for the most part) had good relations with white church bodies and white ministers.

So again I make the argument that there was an ethnogenesis at the Massachusetts mission. The new ethnic group was different to some extent because some (or many) came from non-Mohican tribes, but mostly, the Stockbridge Mohicans were different from the pre-Christian Mohicans because they adopted a new religion. And don't forget: back then religion wasn't separated from almost everything else - it was your culture.


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Ethnogenesis: Another Comparison between the Stockbridge and Brothertown Indians

I hadn't heard of the term "ethnogenesis" before I found Craig Cipolla's new book at my public library.

The title of the book is
Becoming Brothertown: Native American Ethnogenesis and Endurance in the Modern World

I've only read part of it so far, but based on the table of contents and the opportunity I've had to read Cipolla's PhD dissertation (which the book is based on) it is largely an analysis of gavesites and other above-ground types of archealogical data. Not the kind of book you'd expect to see in your local public library, but I live in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, the home-in-exile of the Brothertown Indians.

Anyway, this blogpost is about ethnogenesis. Cipolla defines it on page 23:

Ethnogenesis is the process by which new ethnic identities emerge.

If you know anything about the Brothertown Indians, you can understand the relevance of ethnogenesis to their history. The Brothertown community was formed out of Indians from the following tribes: Narragansetts, Pequots, Mohegans, Montauketts, Niantics and Tunxis (an inexact list, based on page 5 of Cipolla's Becoming Brothertown).

Every Native nation went through big changes when Europeans arrived on the scene.

But evolutionary changes are experienced by all ethnic groups. A lot of tribes were at least able to stick together and keep their old names. For example, the pre-white contact tribe known as the Lakota Sioux are - despite the very tough times they are experiencing - still known as Lakota Sioux today. While the Lakota Sioux have gone through many changes as a people, today's Lakota Sioux "evolved" from the pre-contact Lakota Sioux. So it follows that social scientists don't speak of a Lakota ethnogenesis.

Can you tell where I'm going with this?

Like I often do here, I'm going to relate the concept of ethnogenesis to the Stockbridge Mohicans.

Did an ethnogenesis occur which "created" the Stockbridge Mohicans?

You're entitled to your own opinion on that, but I feel pretty strongly that the answer is yes.

Some may argue that the Mohicans (or any variation of that name: Mahican, Muhhecunnuk, Mohheconnew, and possibly others) existed prior to white contact. And in a very real sense they did - because there was a group of Indians that used that name.

Again, some may argue that although Indians from other tribes were added over the years, that was nothing different from what every other tribe did - they married Indians from other tribes and sometimes a village added to it's numbers by means of raids on other tribes.

But I'm arguing the other side.
Based on my research, the Indians that got together at Stockbridge, Massachusetts underwent an ethnogenesis.
 
Starting with people from two Mohican villages on the Housatonic, the community grew... and in the first few years it grew largely from the appeal of John Sergeant's preaching (Patrick Frazier covers this well in The Mohicans of Stockbridge).
 
At a time when baptism was a relatively exclusive rite among Calvinists, many Indians pressured Sergeant to baptize them. Between 1735 and his death in 1749, Sergeant baptized 182 Indians (source: Hopkins, 1753). And they came from a number of different tribes.

Then in the 1750's, the last remnant of Wappingers came to town. Numbering over 200, they were probably more numerous than the "Mohicans," but the name "Mohican" stuck, nonetheless.

I won't belabor the point. There may be some who disagree with me and I'd like to hear their (your) arguments.

 
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How did the Stockbridge Mohicans get Dragged into the French and Indian War?

The front cover of The Mohicans of Stockbridge

The vast majority of Indians fighting in the French and Indian War were allied with France. So why then did the Stockbridge Mohicans ally themselves with the British?

Well, they already were allies with the British. The Christian mission established in 1734 in what is now the state (commonwealth) of Massachusetts came about largely or at least partly, for political reasons. If it seems to you that the British were being deceitful, remember that the thing we call "separation of church and state" had not been invented at that point. So there was no shame in "using" religion to recruit Native subjects to the British Crown. (Some of those subjects later proved to be a great guerrilla fighting force.)

The Indians needed white allies because they were struggling to survive. Meanwhile, the British needed Native allies because they were struggling with the French - for world domination.

Another question is why were individual Indians wiling to fight the French and their Native allies. The answer, if I remember what Patrick Frazier wrote somewhere in The Mohicans of Stockbridge, is twofold: 1) the Indian men still identified themselves as warriors - that was who they were and what they did, and 2) they had debts to pay and fighting was a way to earn money and avoid their creditors.

All of that is the context. Just as important were the real events - initiated by France's Native allies - that brought the white and Native residents of Stockbridge [Massachusetts] into the French and Indian War. These events were described so well by Patrick Frazier in the Mohicans of Stockbridge, that I scanned page 107 for you to read (click on the image to enlarge it):



That page and much of the rest of The Mohicans of Stockbridge is available from Google books.

The long and short of it is that the Scaticokes and Abenakis had been busy in the neighborhood of Stockbridge and Albany, killing cattle, burning buildings, and even murdering an infant and a servant in the town of Stockbridge. Such aggression would not be tolerated. War was on!

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The French and Indian War: Something about that Name

This painting was borrowed from the Lake George Mirror.

Have you noticed that there is something Anglocentric about the name "French and Indian War." It assumes that you're English or British. Maybe some would argue that the winners of a war get to name it. I don't know if that is true, but if the so-called French and Indian War had gone the other way, we might not be speaking English here in the United States today.

Instead, that war went the way that it went. The British side (including, of course, their white colonial allies and their Native allies - the Indians from Stockbridge, Massachusetts) won that war.

But the name... I still don't like it. The bias is too obvious. Unfortunately, I cannot think of a better alternative. One Indian I know tried to give that war a different name. I don't remember exactly what she called it, but it seemed to also reflect her own biases.

To French Canadians that war is known as La guerre de la Conquête, which means "The War of Conquest." I like the drama in that name, but it is so generic.

The historical event that we refer to as "The French and Indian War" refers to the North American part of the Seven Years' War, which was essentially the world's first "world war," despite not getting credit for that in its name. In addition to North America, the Seven Years' War had the superpowers of France and Great Britian in a tussle over parts of Europe, as well as much of Central America, the West African coast, India, and the Philippines. Arguably, the colonizers had no right to claim land that was already occupied by people, but that moral argument is beside the point. The war was what it was, and the name still is what it is.

The best alternative name I can come up with is "The North American Theater of the Seven Years' War." Nine words long. It will never be adopted into common English usage.

How about you, is there a name you'd prefer to use for the so-called "French and Indian War"?

"Mohicans" is the title of a new video with music by Leo Rojas

No description was available on YouTube.