Mohican Tribe reclaims sacred mountain in MA

Frank Vaisvilas

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

USA TODAY NETWORK – WISCONSIN

MILWAUKEE – One of the most storied Native American tribes has taken another step toward reclaiming history that was ripped away more than 200 years ago.

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 the tribe’s original homeland in Massachusetts.

The Mohican Tribe lived on what is now parts of Massachusetts and New York for thousands of years before being forced to move by European colonists, 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.

'It represents a ‘landback’ movement to reclaim land in a way that differs from the Western colonial way of thinking about it,' Shannon Holsey, president of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Tribe, 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, 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 1,642feet and includes public hiking trails offering views of a river valley, the Berkshires highlands and Catskill Mountains.

In 2023, Massachusetts legislators voted to award the Mohican Nation $2.6million to assist it in purchasing the mountain. With the award, the tribe is now responsible for implementing tribal conservation and forest management strategies there.

The award is part of ongoing efforts by Massachusetts officials to renew relationships with the tribe that was unwelcome 200 years ago.

The town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, was founded in 1739 as a kind of experiment in which Mohicans and colonists would live, work and govern together. Mohicans also helped win the American Revolution, serving as scouts and warriors for the Continental Army. George Washington visited Stockbridge shortly after the war to thank the Mohicans personally for their services.

But the founding of a new nation 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,' Patrick White, selectman for the Stockbridge Town Board, told 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.