Driven to Wisconsin after helping win U.S. Revolution, Mohicans now have bought land back home
The Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Tribe of Wisconsin recently closed a deal to purchase 372 undeveloped acres of Monument Mountain, which carries sacred meaning and is part of its original homeland in Massachusetts.
The Mohican Tribe had been located on what is now parts of Massachusetts and New York for thousands of years before being forced to move by European colonists, and eventually settling in Wisconsin more than 200 years ago. The tribe has been reclaiming some land in New York and Massachusetts in the past few years.
More: This tribe helped win the Revolution, then were expelled and migrated to Wisconsin. What's changed now?
'It represents a 'landback' movement to reclaim land in a way that differs from the Western colonial way of thinking about it,' Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation President Shannon Holsey said in a statement. 'We are trying to reclaim our ways of being, which was never based on money. It's the reclamation of our kinship systems, our governance systems, our ceremony and spirituality, our language, our culture and our food and medicinal systems. Those are all based on our relationship to the land.'
Mohican people still make pilgrimages to Monument Mountain as it has always been a place where tribal members would leave stone offerings imbued with prayers to Creator. The stones had been formed into a monument, giving the mountain its name.
The mountain's peak reaches 1,642 feet and includes public hiking trails offering views of a river valley and the Berkshires highlands and Catskill Mountains.
In 2023, Massachusetts Commonwealth legislators voted to award the Mohican Nation $2.6 million to assist it in purchasing the mountain. With the award, the tribe is now responsible for implementing tribal conservation and forest management strategies on the mountain.
The award is part of ongoing efforts by Massachusetts officials to renew relationships with the tribe. That's a shift from the tribe being unwelcome more than 200 years ago.
The town of Stockbridge, Massachusettes, was founded in 1739 as a kind of experiment in which Mohicans and colonists would live, work and govern together. Mohicans also helped to win the American Revolution, serving as scouts and warriors for the Continental Army. General George Washington visited Stockbridge shortly after the war to thank the Mohicans personally for their services.
More: Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican officials aim to prove feast with George Washington happened
But the founding of a new nation also attracted many more European immigrants who coveted property owned by the Mohicans and other Indigenous peoples.
The Mohicans were driven away from Stockbridge and from New England, eventually settling on Menominee land in Wisconsin, where they were joined by a group of Delaware people known as the Munsee.
'I feel like we have an opportunity to welcome people back,' said Patrick White, selectman for the Stockbridge Town Board, to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last year. 'I personally have had enough of the division (in America).'
In 2021, the conservation group Open Space Institute returned part of an island from the Mohican ancestral homeland in New York to the tribe.
The 156-acre portion of Papscanee Island, in the Hudson River, that was returned to the tribe remains a nature preserve with a public hiking trail.
More: New York island returned to Wisconsin-based Mohican Nation after hundreds of years
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Frank Vaisvilas is a former Report for America corps member who covers Native American issues in Wisconsin based at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Contact him at fvaisvilas@gannett.com or 815-260-2262. Follow him on Twitter at @vaisvilas_frank.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Mohican Tribe in Wisconsin reclaims sacred mountain in Massachusetts
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