Description
The Mohican also Mahican are an Eastern Algonquian Native American tribe and part of the Eastern Algonquian family of tribes, they are related to the neighboring Lenape, whose indigenous territory was to the south as far as the Atlantic coast. They combined with Lenape Native Americans (a branch known as the Munsee) in Stockbridge, MA, and later the people moved west away from pressure of European invasion. Following the disruption of the American Revolutionary War, most of the Mohican descendants first migrated westward to join the Iroquois Oneida on their reservation in central New York. The tribe identified by the place where they lived: Muh-he-ka-neew (or "people of the continually flowing waters").
Language
The formally extinct Mohican language belonged to the Eastern Algonquian branch of the Algonquian language family.
Culture
The Mohican villages were governed by hereditary sachems advised by a council of clan elders. They had a matrilineal kinship system, with property and inheritance (including such hereditary offices) passed through the maternal line. The villages usually consisted of a small cluster of small and mid-sized longhouses, and were located along floodplains. During times of war, they built fortifications in defensive locations as places of retreat. Their cornfields were located near their communities; the women also cultivated varieties of squash, beans, sunflowers, and other crops from the Eastern Agricultural Complex. This was supplemented by the men hunting game (turkeys, deer, elk, bears, and moose in the Taconics) and fishing (sturgeon, alewives, shad, eels, lamprey and striped bass).