Mahican

The Mahicans (also Mohicans) are a Native American tribe who were living in and around the Hudson Valley at the time of their first contact with Europeans in 1609. Over the next hundred years, tensions between the Mahicans and the Mohawks as well as the Europeans caused the Mahicans to migrate eastward; many settled in what would eventually become the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. For this reason this group of Mahicans has also frequently been known as the Stockbridge Indians.

The Stockbridge Indians allowed Protestant Christian missionaries to live among them and converted to Christianity in the 18th century. Although they fought on the side of the American colonists in both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, they were dispossessed of their land and forced to move westward, first to Stockbridge, New York in the 1780s and later to Shawano County, Wisconsin in the 1820s and 1830s. In Wisconsin, they settled on reservations with the Munsee; the two were jointly known as Stockbridge-Munsee.

Today the reservation is known as that of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians.

The now extinct Mahican language belonged to the Eastern Algonquian branch of the Algic language family.

James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Last of the Mohicans confuses the Mahicans with the Mohegans, a different Algonquian tribe living in eastern Connecticut. The novel takes place in the Hudson Valley, Mahican land, but characters' names, such as Uncas, are Mohegan.