The headquarters for the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans is in Shawano County in northeastern Wisconsin. The tribe's forty-six-thousand-acre reservation encompasses two townships, Red Springs and Bartelme. Approximately sixteen thousand acres of this land are held in trust for the tribe by the U.S. government.
The history of the Stockbridge-Munsee people is punctuated by repeated migrations and removals. Tradition says that originally a great mass of people moved from the north and west seeking a place where the waters were never still. They established a homeland on both sides of the Mahicanituk (later called Hudson's) River. The earliest known contact between these "Mahican" people and Europeans was with Dutch fur traders in the early seventeenth century. In 1734, the Mahicans agreed to let Protestant missionaries come among them; the missionaries were followed by teachers, farmers, and other colonials. A church and a school were built, and a village named Stockbridge, Massachusetts, grew up around them. The Christian Mahicans who lived there became known as Stockbridge Indians.
Stockbridge Indians fought on the side of the Americans in the Revolutionary War, but by war's end they found that their land titles were not recognized by the new federal government. They were landless. They moved west to lands in New York State provided them by the Oneida tribe, another largely Christian group that had fought against the British. During the following 150 years, the Stockbridge people were forced to move from New York to Indiana and later to several places in Wisconsin, where some Munsee Delaware families joined them. These removals and disruptions created insecurity and tensions that still affect the people today. Resisting removal west of the Mississippi River, the Stockbridge-Munsees moved to a reservation in Shawano County, Wisconsin, in 1856. By 1920, the distribution of their lands dictated by the terms of the General Allotment Act again rendered the group landless and destitute.
In 1934 the Indian Reorganization Act gave the Stockbridge-Munsees an opportunity to re-form into a tribal entity. Carl Miller provided the leadership for this tribal rebirth. The new tribe acquired approximately fifteen thousand acres of submarginal timberland and began establishing a tribal presence on the new reservation. Harry A. Chicks was elected the first tribal president. The second president, Arvid E. Miller, led the people for twenty-six years. He was a charter member of the National Congress of American Indians (1944) and helped establish the Great Lakes Intertribal Council in 1961.
Today about half of the tribe's fourteen hundred members reside on or near the reservation in northeastern Wisconsin. The tribe is led by a seven-member council, which is responsible for upholding the tribal constitution and ordinances and managing a variety of social-service programs. Located on the reservation are tribal offices, a clinic, a residential facility for the elderly, a family community center, a historical library and museum, a campground and powwow grounds, and several tribal enterprises, including a bingo hall, casino, and golf course. Several small private businesses also operate within the reservation.
The Stockbridge-Munsee people, having survived centuries of movement and political struggle, have adopted as their symbol the Many Trails, designed and made by tribal member Edwin Martin. It symbolizes the strength, hope, and endurance of the Mohican people.
See also
Indian-White Relations in the United States, 1776-1900;
Oneida.
T. J. Brasser, Handbook of North American Indians "Mahican," ed. William C. Sturtevant, vol. 15, Northeast, ed. Bruce Trigger (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1978); Patrick Frazier, The Mohicans of Stockbridge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992); John C. Savagian, Wisconsin Magazine of History "The Tribal Reorganization of the Stockbridge-Munsee: Essential Conditions in the Re-Creation of a Native American Community, 1930-1942," 77, no. 1 (autumn 1993): 39-62.
Dorothy W. Davids
Mohican
Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee
