What is "mahican"

Mahican \Mahican\ prop. n. Variant of Mohican. [Also spelled Mohican.]

The Mahicans ( or Mohicans ) are an Eastern Algonquian Native American tribe related to the abutting Delaware people, originally settled in the upper Hudson River Valley (around Albany, New York) and western New England centered on Pittsfield, Massachusetts and lower present-day Vermont. After 1680, due to conflicts with the Mohawk during the Beaver Wars, many were driven southeastwards across the present-day Massachusetts western border and the Berkshires to Berkshire County around Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Since the forcible relocation of Amerindian populations to reservations in the American west during the 1830s, most descendants of the Mahican are located in Shawano County, Wisconsin, where decades later they eventually formed the federally recognized Stockbridge-Munsee Community with registered members of the Leni Lenape people and have a reservation.

Following the disruption of the American Revolutionary War, most of the Mahican descendants first migrated westward to join the Iroquois Oneida on their reservation in central New York. The Oneida gave them about 22,000 acres for their use. After more than two decades, in the 1820s and 1830s, the Oneida and the Stockbridge moved again, pressured to relocate to northeastern Wisconsin under the federal Indian Removal program. The tribe's name came from where they lived: "Muh-he-ka-neew" (or "People of the continually flowing waters.") The word Muh-he-kan refers to a great sea or body of water and the Hudson River reminded them of their place of origin, so they named the Hudson River "Seepow Mahecaniittuck," or the river where there are people from the continually flowing waters. Therefore, they, along with tribes also living along the Hudson River (like the Munsee and Wappinger), were called "the River Indians" by the Dutch and English. The Dutch heard and wrote the term for the people of the area variously as: Mahigan, Mahikander, Mahinganak, Maikan and Mawhickon, which the English simplified later to Mahican or Mohican. The French, through their Indian allies in Canada, called the Mahicans Loups (or wolves) just as they called the Iroquois the "Snake People," (or "Five Nations.") Like the Munsee and Wappingers, the Mahicans were related to the Lenape people of the Delaware River valley.

In the late twentieth century, they joined other former New York tribes and the Oneida in filing land claims against New York state for what were considered unconstitutional purchases after the Revolutionary War. In 2010, outgoing governor David Paterson announced a land exchange with the Stockbridge-Munsee that would enable them to build a large casino on in Sullivan County in the Catskills, in exchange for dropping their larger claim in Madison County. The deal had many opponents.