Content area
Full Text
It was one of those lazy days in mid-August with the sun shining out of a cloudless sky and a lone eagle circling above that can perhaps only occur in the north woods of Wisconsin.
As we approached an open area we were confronted by several hundred Native Americans, many in colorful dance clothes, assembled to celebrate the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Powwow. Here, near the town of Bowler, Wisconsin, live people who claim to be descendants of the famed Mohicans. But, surely the Mohicans had become extinct as a people according to James Fenimore Cooper who wrote the famous adventure novel The Last of the Mohicans set during the 1750s. So, how did the descendants of a Native American tribe originally living along the Hudson River, a few hundred miles north of New Y ork City, finish up in the woods of northern Wisconsin? It is a remarkable story of ethnic endurance.
Cooper's famous novel actually confuses two independent tribes. The first are the people who were variously know as as "Mahikan" to the Dutch settlers, "Mahican" to British colonial authorities, and "Mohican" in popular writings. The others are the Mohegan of Connecticut from whom Cooper borrowed the name of one of their 17th century sachems (chiefs) Uncas, to become a central character of his saga.
However, Cooper's novel is set over a hundred years later during the French and Indian War (1754-1760) in North America, or as Europeans call this world wide conflict, "The Seven Years War" (1756-1763). His novel concerns the fighting between the French and British forces and their Native allies around the British Fort William Henry at Lake George in, what is now, northern New York state. A further confusion follows the French practice of calling several Native tribes in New York state and New England, "Loups" or wolves including both the Mohican and Mohegan. But, these two tribes are not closely related only in so far as both their languages are members of the wide spread Algonquian language family. Apparently the Mohicans' real name derives from "Muhheakunnuk" or...