As 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.

Decades later the United States government organized the Stockbridge-Munsee Community with registered members of the Munsee people and a 22,000-acre (89 km2) reservation, which was originally the land of the Menominee Nation.

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.

After more than two decades, in the 1820s and 1830s, the Oneida and the Stockbridge moved again, pressured to sell their lands and relocate to northeastern Wisconsin under the federal Indian Removal Act.

[1] A group of Mohican also migrated to Ontario, Canada to live with the predominately Iroquois Six Nations of the Grand River reserve.

They referred to the Iroquois Confederacy as the "Snake People" (as they were called by some competitors, or "Five Nations", representing their original tribes).

Mohican territory reached along Hudson River watersheds northeastward to Wood Creek just south of Lake Champlain.

They had a matrilineal kinship system, with property and inheritance (including such hereditary offices) passed through the maternal line.

Moravian missionary John Heckewelder and early anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan both learned from Mohican informants that their matrilineal society was divided into three phratries (Turkey, Turtle, and Wolf).

A general council of sachems met regularly at Scodac (east of present-day Albany) to decide important matters affecting the entire confederacy.

[4] In his history of the Indians of the Hudson River, Edward Manning Ruttenber described the clans of the Mohican as the Bear, the Turkey, the Turtle, and the Wolf.

Each had a role in the lives of the people, and the Wolf served as warriors in the north to defend against the Mohawk, the easternmost of the Five Nations of the Iroquois.

Their cornfields were located near their communities; the women also cultivated varieties of squash, beans, sunflowers, and other crops from the Eastern Agricultural Complex.

Horticulture and the gathering and processing of nuts (hickory, butternuts, black walnuts and acorns), fruits (blueberries, raspberries, juneberries among many others), and roots (groundnuts, wood lilies, arrowroot among others) provided much of their diet.

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).

Iroquois oral tradition, as recorded in the Jesuit Relations, speaks of a war between the Mohawks and an alliance of the Susquehannock and Algonquin (sometime between 1580 and 1600).

[9] In September 1609 Henry Hudson encountered Mohican villages just below present day Albany, with whom he traded goods for furs.

In 1624, Captain Cornelius Jacobsen May sailed the Nieuw Nederlandt upriver and landed eighteen families of Walloons on a plain opposite Castle Island.

The Mohicans invited the Algonquin and Montagnais to bring their furs to Fort Orange as an alternative to French traders in Quebec.

[14] In the eighteenth century, some of the Mohicans developed strong ties with missionaries of the Moravian Church from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who founded a mission at their village of Shekomeko in Dutchess County, New York.

With some help from the missionaries, on 17 October 1743 and already under the new Royal Governor George Clinton, Shabash put together a petition of names of people who could attest that the land in which one of the lots was running through was theirs.

[17] In August 1775, the Six Nations staged a council fire near Albany, after news of Bunker Hill had made war seem imminent.

After much debate, they decided that such a war was a private affair between the British and the colonists (known as Rebels, Revolutionaries, Congress-Men, American Whigs, or Patriots), and that they should stay out of it.

The Mohicans, who as Algonquians were not part of the Iroquois Confederacy, sided with the Patriots, serving at the Siege of Boston, and the battles of Saratoga and Monmouth.

The central figures of Mohican society, including the chief sachem, Joseph Quanaukaunt, and his counselors and relatives, were part of the move to New Stockbridge.

The Stockbridge-Munsee filed a land claim against New York state for 23,000 acres (9,300 ha) in Madison County, the location of its former property.

[22] In 2011, the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of the Mohican Indians regained ownership 156 acres along the Hudson River, a tract known as Papscanee Island Nature Preserve near East Greenbush and Schodack.