Mingo
The Mingo are originally a group of North American Indian tribes of the Iroquois language family who lived in the Ohio Country , western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, and northern West Virginia. Culturally and politically they were close to the Iroquois-speaking Erie , Wenro and Susquehannock .
During the Beaver Wars (also: French and Iroquois Wars , 1640 to 1701) and the French and Indian Wars ( 1689 to 1763), the militarily powerful Iroquois League drove out several smaller Iroquois and Eastern Algonquins in the fight for the trade monopoly and hunting rights in the fur trade - tribes to the west; others became tributaries to the league, and still other peoples were utterly wiped out.
As a reaction to the aggression of the Iroquois , the Mingo and other groups dispersed to the west (including parts of the Seneca and Cayuga ) turned to New France in order to be able to stand together against the settlement pressure of the English colonists and the Iroquois allied with the British.
During the 18th century, members of the Wyandot , Susquehannock, Erie, Shawnee , Lenape and Munsee as well as groups of smaller indigenous peoples immigrated to the Ohio Country and later Northwest Territory (territory north of the Ohio River), where they mostly lived together in multiethnic villages during this Time began the ethnogenesis of the "Mingo". The Mingos were therefore also called Ohio-Iroquois or Ohio-Seneca .
Surname
The Anglo-Americans called these immigrants Mingo or Black Mingo , sometimes also Blue Mingo - the latter primarily around this group of the "White White Minqua / Mingo" ( Susquehannock ), "Black Minquas / Black Mingo" ( Erie ), "Little Minquas / Little Mingo "( Wyandot , until 1650: Hurons ) and" Great Minquas / Big Mingo "( Iroquois League ).
The tribal name Mingos or Minquas in use today is a corruption of a collective name of the Eastern Algonquin for the mostly hostile Iroquois-speaking peoples. The Lenape and Munsee and traditional enemies of the Susquehannock and the Iroquois, used the ethnonym Mengwe ("without penis") or Miqui ("strange, different, far away"), often as ("treacherous" or "insidious, cunning") ) reproduced; the Dutch and Swedes - trading partners and direct colonial neighbors of the Lenape and Munsee - adopted this name as Minquas , later the British and Anglo-Americans as Mingos .
Like many other indigenous peoples , they themselves had no specific tribal designation, but simply called themselves Ökwe'ôweshö'ö (“Real, True Persons, People”; singular: Ökwe'ôwe ).
history
The members of the tribe known as the Mingo had settled the Ohio area as part of a Native American immigration stream in the mid-18th century. This area, which roughly corresponds to today's US state of Ohio , had been very sparsely populated for several decades. The settlements of these immigrants increasingly developed into an association of the immigrant Indian population. These came mainly from the Seneca , Wyandot , Shawnee , Susquehannock and Delawaren tribes . The Ohio area had been the hunting ground of the Iroquois for a long time, which is why the Iroquois League also claimed nominal suzerainty over its residents. However, these opposed this claim and increasingly acted largely independently of the Iroquois. When the Pontiac Rebellion broke out in 1763 , many Mingos allied themselves with members of other Indian tribes to end British rule over the Ohio area. The Iroquois League, on the other hand, continued to maintain its traditional alliance with the British and was once again hostile to the Mingos. Despite some spectacular initial successes, the Pontiac uprising finally ended with the complete defeat of the rebelling Indian tribes. The Mingo / Seneca chief Guyasuta was one of the leaders in this dispute.
By the early 1830s, the Mingos' settlement area in western Ohio developed into a prosperous community. With the expansion of their farms and the establishment of schools, there was also an increasing alignment with American civil society. Regardless of this, however, the Mingos were forced by the 1830 enactment of the Indian Removal Act to sell their properties and relocate to Kansas in 1832. In Kansas, the Mingos met several Seneca clans and both tribes shared the Neosho reservation there . After the American Civil War , the tribe moved on again, now to what is now Ottawa County in the US state of Oklahoma . Since 1937 the tribe has officially called itself Seneca-Cayuga and today has over 2,400 members. Various cultural and religious connections are still maintained with the six nations of the former Iroquois league.
language
The Mingo language or Unyææshæötká ' or Ökwe'öwékhá' is a northern Iroquois language that is linguistically very similar to the Seneca and Cayuga languages . Their language was originally common in eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and West Virginia , and served as a major lingua franca among the allied tribes during the Western Confederacy . It is a polysynthetic language with an extremely complex verb usage and, with currently no more than five speakers, is one of the doomed languages (moribund). However, in recent years there has been an increased interest in the revival of this language, particularly among the descendants of the Mingos.
literature
- James Thomas Flexner: Lord of the Mohawks, Sir William Johnson - mediator between Indians and whites . FA Brockhaus, Wiesbaden 1981, ISBN 3-7653-0334-8 .
- Francis Parkman: The Conspiracy of Pontiac (Vol. 1 + 2) . - Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1885 <reprinted 1969>
Remarks
- ↑ New founding or re-identification of tribes and ethnic groups, or the emergence of new tribes, was not unusual on the advancing frontier. In addition to the Mingos, the Wyandot (formerly Hurons and Tionontati and neutrals), the Seminoles and the Delawars (Lenni Lenape) can be mentioned.
Individual evidence
- ^ Brinton, Daniel G., CF Denke, and Albert Anthony. A Lenâpé - English Dictionary . Biblio Bazaar, 2009. ISBN 978-1103149223
- ^ Brinton, 81 + 85
- ^ Brinton, Daniel G., CF Denke, and Albert Anthony. A Lenâpé - English Dictionary . Biblio Bazaar, 2009. ISBN 978-1103149223
- ^ West Virginia Mingo