Mingo

The Mingo people are an Iroquoian group of Native Americans, primarily Seneca and Cayuga, who migrated west from New York to the Ohio Country in the mid-18th century, and their descendants.

At the turn of the 20th century, they lost control of communal lands when property was allocated to individual households in a government assimilation effort related to the Dawes Act and extinguishing Indian claims to prepare for the admission of Oklahoma as a state.

The etymology of the name Mingo derives from the Delaware (Lenape) word, mingwe or Minque, as adapted from their Algonquian language, meaning "stealthy".

In the 17th century, the terms Minqua or Minquaa were used interchangeably to refer to the five nations of the Iroquois League and to the Susquehannock, another Iroquoian-speaking people.

The people who became known as Mingo migrated to the Ohio Country along the river in the mid-eighteenth century, part of a movement of various Native American tribes away from European pressures to a region that had been sparsely populated for decades but controlled as a hunting ground by the Iroquois League of the Five Nations.

The "Mingo dialect" that dominated the Ohio valley from the late 17th to early 18th centuries is considered a variant most similar to the Seneca language.

Their villages were increasingly an amalgamation of Iroquoian-speaking Seneca, Wyandot, and Susquehannock; Siouan-language speaking Tutelo and Algonquian-language Shawnee and Delaware migrants.

At that time, most of the six Iroquois nations based in New York (who then numbered six, as the Tuscarora had joined them from the South about 1722) were closely allied to the British because of their lucrative fur trading.

After the US passed the Indian Removal Act in that same year, the government pressured the Mingo to sell their lands and migrate west of the Mississippi River to Kansas, which they did in 1832.

They continue to maintain cultural and religious ties to the Six Nations of the Iroquois, which have been based largely in Ontario, Canada since after the American Revolutionary War.