Haudenosaunee descendants of all six tribes still live on the Six Nations Reserve at Oshweken, Ontario, where Joseph Brant made his new home. Other Mohawk fled to Montreal at the end of the American Revolution and were granted reserve lands at Tyendinaga on the north shore of Lake Ontario.
MOHAWK 171
Not all Mohawk followed this same order of migra-tion or this exact pattern of alliance. Some had moved to Canada much earlier, as allies of the French. Starting in 1667, a group of Mohawk migrated from the Fonda, New York, region to La Prairie, a Jesuit mission, on the St. Lawrence River in Quebec. After having lived in sev-eral different locations in the area, in 1676 they finally settled just south of Montreal at a site they called Caugh-nawaga, after their original village in New York State.
The spelling Kahnawake now is used.
The Kahnawake Mohawk practiced Catholicism, like the French. They also sometimes worked for the French as scouts and fur traders and fought with them as allies against the English. But they remained part of the Iro-quois League and, at various times during the French and Indian wars, supported the English, along with other Haudenosaunee, against the French. They were a proud and independent people whom neither the French nor English could take for granted.
One celebrated Kahnawake Mohawk was Kateri Tekakwitha, called “Lily of the Mohawks.” She was born and baptized a Christian in the Mohawk valley but later moved to Kahnawake in Canada to escape persecution by non-Christian Indians. Her parents and brother died in a smallpox epidemic. She caught the disease too and her skin was severely scarred. But, it is said, because of her great faith in Catholicism and her dedication to helping others, when she died at the age of 24 in 1680 a miracle occurred—her pockmarks disappeared. In 1943, the Roman Catholic Church declared Kateri “venera-ble.” Then in 1980, the church declared her “blessed,”
the second step toward canonization.
In 1755, at the urging of Jesuits who wanted to estab-lish a French presence farther westward, a group of Mohawk from Kahnawake moved to a site on the St.
Lawrence, south of present-day Cornwall, Ontario, and east of Massena, New York. What was known as the St.
Regis Mission, the oldest permanent settlement in northern New York, became the St. Regis Reservation on the U.S. side of the St. Lawrence and the Akwesasne Reserve on the Canadian side, the preferred name among the Mohawk. Akwesasne Mohawk, who negoti-ate with four different governmental bodies—the U.S.
and Canadian federal governments as well as New York and Ontario state and provincial governments—have had to struggle for sovereign rights. In 1968, they staged a protest by blocking the St. Lawrence Seaway Interna-tional Bridge. They claimed that the Canadian govern-ment was not honoring the Jay Treaty of 1794, guaranteeing them the right to travel unrestricted back and forth between Canada and the United States. Border
officials changed the policy, making crossings easier for tribal members. Moreover, until recent changes in the Indian Act of Canada, a Canadian Mohawk woman who married an American Mohawk man lost her Indian sta-tus and benefits. Akwesasne Mohawk also have had to struggle against big business threatening to pollute their homeland. In 1984, it was discovered that toxic wastes, especially deadly PCBs, from a neighboring off-reserva-tion General Motors factory were endangering inhabi-tants.
Kahnawake and Awkwesasne Mohawk have become especially renowned as high-steel workers. Tribal mem-bers have traveled all over North America, and to other continents as well, to work on tall buildings and bridges, a tradition that began in 1886 when the Mohawk proved sure-footed and fearless in the construction of a bridge across the St. Lawrence River. The degree of risk in the profession was indicated in 1907, with the collapse of a portion of another bridge across the St. Lawrence, due to a faulty design, killing 33 ironworkers. A community of Mohawk ironworkers and relatives developed in Brook-lyn, New York.
In the 19th century, Mohawk also settled the Lake of Two Mountains Reserve (now called Kanesatake) near Oka, Quebec, and the Gibson Reserve (Wahta) on Geor-gian Bay in Ontario.
In 1974, some 200 Akwesasne Mohawk and others occupied New York State–held land at Eagle Bay on Moss Lake in the Adirondacks, claiming original title to it. They called this 612-acre parcel of land Ganienkeh (or Kanienkah). In 1977, after negotiations with the state, the Mohawk activists were granted reservation lands at Schuyler and Altona Lakes in Clinton County.
In 1990, after a dispute between Canadian Mohawk and Quebec police over the construction of a golf course
172 MOHAWK
Mohawk ash-splint and sweetgrass basket (modern)
The Mohegan actually were a subgroup of the
PEQUOT. When English settlers arrived in their terri-tory soon after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, the sachem Sassacus headed the Pequot.
Their main village was on the Thames River in Con-necticut. But a subordinate chief named Uncas rebelled and led a group to another village on the Thames near Long Island Sound. They became known by the name Mohegan, pronounced mo-HEE-gun, derived from maingan for “wolf.”
The Mohegan had lifeways similar to other NORTH
-EAST INDIANSin New England and Long Island. Forests, ocean, bays, rivers, and lakes provided their food, their raw materials, and inspiration for their myths and leg-ends. They lived in both domed wigwams and rectangu-lar houses, usually covered with birch bark. They used framed birch-bark canoes as well as dugouts made from a single tree.
Because of the similarity of their tribal names, the Mohegan often are confused with other ALGONQUIANS, the MAHICAN, living along the northern Hudson valley.
Although both peoples might be descended from the same distant ancestors, along with the Pequot, they are distinct groups. Another point of confusion is that both have been referred to as “Mohican,” a spelling popular-ized by the writer James Fenimore Cooper in his 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans. It seems likely that in his writings about events in upstate New York during the French and Indian wars in the 1700s, Cooper was more likely drawing on what he knew of the Mohegan because the character Chingachgook, an Algonquian chief and best friend of the hero Natty Bumppo, mentions a
“Mohican land by the sea,” which would apply to the Mohegan but not the Mahican. Moreover, Cooper used the name Uncas for the son of Chingachgook. In any case, the work is fictional, and despite some difficult
MOHEGAN 173
on land considered sacred to the Mohawk at Kanese-take—which led to barricades being erected and a stand-off with police at Kahnawake as well—a group of Mohawk left Canada, purchasing 200 acres near
Akwe-sasne on the United States side of the border in New York State.
In 1993, following a conflict between traditionalists who opposed casino gaming at Akwesasne and a pro-gambling faction, a group of traditionalists purchased a piece of property in their ancestral homeland—on the north shore of the Mohawk River west of Fonda, New York—and established a community known as Kanatsio-hareke. The residents speak the Mohawk language, hold traditional ceremonies, and practice traditional farming.
For additional income, Kanatsiohareke Mohawk main-tain a bed-and-breakfast and a crafts store.
The Mohawk Nation Council of Chiefs is responsible for political, social, and cultural affairs of the eight cur-rent Mohawk territories—Akwesasne, Ganienkeh, Kah-nawake, Kanesatake, Kanatsiohareke, Six Nations, Tyendinega, and Wahta—and tribal members who choose to live elsewhere.
What has been known as the Native North American Travelling College, now the Ronathahonni Cultural Center, through its resource center and Travel Troupe, is dedicated to teaching the history and culture of the Hau-denosaunee. Its Travel Troupe has performed traditional songs, dance, and storytelling throughout North Amer-ica and in Europe, Asia, and Australia. Ronathahonni means “made the path.”
MOHEGAN
A Mohawk girl and her bike
times in the course of their history, the Mohegan have endured.
Following the defeat of the Pequot by the colonists in the Pequot War of 1637, Uncas, who had befriended the colonists, became chief of the remaining Pequot as well as the Mohegan. As allies of the English against the French, Uncas’s group preserved their autonomy longer than their neighbors, the WAMPANOAG and NARRA
-GANSETT, who were defeated in King Philip’s War of 1675–76. Some NIANTICsettled among them after the war. But British settlers eventually turned against the Mohegan too and appropriated most of their lands.
Some tribal members were sold into slavery along with captives from other tribes. The Mohegan also suffered from a series of smallpox outbreaks in New England, ravaging New England’s Algonquians.
The Mohegan Tribe gained federal recognition in 1994, at which time it settled its land claims with the state of Connecticut dating back to the time of Uncas.
Many Mohegan live on ancestral lands in the area of Uncasville. The Mohegan Sun Resort in Uncasville, the third-largest casino in the United States, opened in 1996. Along with the equally highly successful Fox-woods Resort, operated by the Mashantucket Pequot tribe, the Mohegan Sun has revitalized the economy of the region and has provided new income and opportu-nity for tribal members. The Mohegan tribe purchased the Connecticut Sun of the Women’s National Basket-ball Association (WNBA), becoming the first Indian nation to own a major sports team. Another group known as the Golden Hill Pequot and Mohegan tribes operates out of Trumbull, Connecticut.
174 MOJAVE
Mojave, or Mohave, both pronounced mo-HAH-vee, is a derivation of Ahamecav, meaning “people who live along the river.” The Mojave occupied ancestral territory near other Yuman-speaking peoples along both sides of the Colorado River, the present border between the states of Arizona, California, and Nevada. They are grouped together with the YUMA(QUECHAN) in a category called the River Yumans. The Upland Yumans, such as the
HAVASUPAI, HUALAPAI, and YAVAPAI, lived to the north and east of the Mojave. All the Yumans are considered part of the Southwest Culture Area, although they lived on the edge of the Great Basin and California Culture Areas (see SOUTHWEST INDIANS).
Lifeways
The Mojave Desert, named after the Mojave people, is one of the most extreme environments in North Amer-ica. Temperatures often climb above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the hot sun, then drop drastically at
night. But the Mojave coped with these extremes by settling along the bottomlands of the lower Colorado River. Every year, with the melting of snows in the mountains to the northeast, the lower Colorado flooded and provided suitable conditions for farming.
In this strip of silty soil cutting through the desert, tribal members planted corn, beans, pumpkins, mel-ons, and, after they had received seeds brought from Europe by whites, wheat. They also fished the Col-orado River, hunted small desert game, especially rab-bits, and gathered wild plant foods, such as piñon nuts and mesquite beans.
The Mojave lived in dwellings made of brush and earth.
For the warm weather, they built flat-roofed, open-sided structures; for the cold periods, they made low, rectangular structures. Mojave clothing consisted of sandals and breechcloths for men, and sandals and aprons for women.
In cold weather, both men and women wore rabbit-skin blankets and robes. Both men and women decorated their skin with tattoos and body paint.
MOJAVE
Mohegan wooden doll
The Montagnais of what now is northeastern Canada traditionally had much in common with the NASKAPI
living even farther to the north. The two peoples spoke nearly identical dialects of the Algonquian language fam-ily and referred to themselves as Innu, “the people.” Liv-ing in small nomadic bands, they had similar lifeways in the rugged subarctic environment of present-day Labrador and northern Quebec (see SUBARCTIC INDI
-ANS). Their bands in fact were their politically cohesive groups rather than the larger designations—Montagnais or Naskapi—as applied by non-Indians. The Montag-nais also were close neighbors to the Mistassini band of
CREE, also ALGONQUIANS, but their respective dialects differed.
Montagnais, pronounced mon-tun-YAY, means
“mountaineers” in French. The Laurentian Mountains
MONTAGNAIS 175
The Mojave had a reputation as fierce fighters. A spe-cial society of warriors, called the Kwanamis, led the other men in battle. Mojave war parties were organized into three different fighting groups: archers, clubbers, and stickmen.
The Mojave made war with certain neighboring peo-ples, such as the AKIMEL O’ODHAM (PIMA) and
TOHONO O’ODHAM (PAPAGO), but they traded with others. Mojave traders traveled all the way to the Gulf of California or to the Pacific Ocean to barter agricultural products with coastal tribes for shells and feathers. To cross the Colorado and other rivers, the Mojave made rafts from bundles of reeds.
Contacts with Non-Indians
The Mojave had early contacts with Spaniards, who entered their domain out of Mexico. Hernando de
Alar-cón may have encountered them as early as 1540 during his trip along the Gulf of California. Juan de Oñate, who explored much of the Southwest, reached them in 1604.
Francisco Garcés visited them in 1775–76. Mojave worked for Garcés as scouts in his expedition to the Grand Canyon.
Despite Spanish attempts to move them to missions, the Mojave kept their independence. The Spanish called them “wild Indians.” When Anglo-Americans began entering their domain, the Mojave often raided their car-avans. Mojave warriors attacked the trapping expedition of the mountain man Jedediah Smith in 1827.
With the Mexican Cession of 1848, which granted most of the Southwest to the United States, and the discovery of gold in California late that same year, more and more non-Indians began crossing Mojave lands along the Southern Overland Trail. Mojave war-riors harassed many of the travelers. The establishment of Fort Yuma at the Yuma Crossing of the Colorado just south of the Mojave territory decreased the num-ber of raids.