In 1626, a joint force of Moheakin warriors and Dutch soldiers marched out of Fort Orange to counterattack the Mohawk, only to walk straight into a deadly ambush about a mile from the fort. By the end of the slaughter, Dutch commander Daniel van Kriekenbeek, three of his men, and 24 Moheakins were dead. Before leaving the battlefield, Mohawk warriors removed body parts from some of the slain, bound for a ritual feast. Members of the Mohawk tribe would ceremonially eat the flesh of their enemies as a show of supremacy and humiliation.
The attack was just one chapter in a long and brutal rivalry between two powerful Native American nations, a conflict drastically intensified by the arrival of European colonists and the fur trade. The Moheakins, whose name in their Algonquin language means “the people of the waters that are never still,” referred to themselves that way because the Hudson River’s waters flow in both directions due to tidal forces. Their traditional territory stretched across much of today’s Hudson River Valley, from Vermont to the Atlantic Ocean. Moheakin society was matrilocal and matrinal, with property and inheritance passed through the mother’s bloodline.
Villages consisted of clusters of long houses along flood plains, where several related families lived together under one roof. Each community followed a hereditary chief known as a sagamore, who took advice from a council of clan elders. The tribe was divided into four clans—the Bear, the Turkey, the Turtle, and the Wolf—with different clans filling different roles. The Wolf clan, for instance, served as warriors, a necessity given the constant threat posed by the Mohawk.
The Mohawk represented the easternmost members of the Iroquois Confederacy, whose territory stretched from Lake Ontario across New York. Violence between the two Algonquin and Iroquoian peoples Was frequent even before Europeans arrived, as early Jesuit missionaries heard stories of wars between them in the years before colonization. When Henry Hudson first encountered the Moheakans in 1609, he was immediately drawn to the furs their hunters gathered. His trade sparked such interest in Europe that Dutch merchants soon flooded the Hudson Valley, desperate for Native American furs and willing to exchange metal goods for them.
But the trade came at a terrible cost. European diseases, to which the Moheakans had no resistance, began decimating their numbers. And the metal goods sparked a complete cultural shift, intensifying competition between the Moheakans and the Mohawk for access to European trade,
The Dutch brokered a truce between the rivals in 1614 before founding Fort Nassau on Castle Island, near the Moheakin capital. But the truce lasted only a couple of years before fighting broke out once more, and flooding badly damaged Fort Nassau in 1617, prompting the Dutch to abandon it entirely.
It wasn’t until 1624 that 18 Dutch families founded Fort Orange on the mainland, establishing a permanent colony in the region. The Moheakans, whose proximity to the Europeans raised their cultural status, began inviting Algonquin tribes from further north down to trade at Fort Orange. They exerted growing influence on other tribes, which the Mohawk saw as a threat. The Mohawk struck first, attacking Moheakin territory, but the Moheakans counterattacked and razed the easternmost Mohawk fortification.
In response, the Mohawk resettled on lands south of the Mohawk River, within spitting distance of Fort Orange. What started as a trading post was suddenly becoming a war zone, and so many Dutch settlers abandoned Fort Orange for the more peaceful settlement of New Amsterdam near the river’s mouth that the fort nearly emptied. While some Dutch fled, others decided to get involved. The Moheakans, who considered the confluence of the two rivers their home, went to the Dutch for help repelling the encroaching Mohawk.
That plea led directly to the deadly ambush of 1626, when Commander van Kriekenbeek and his men marched out alongside a Moheakin fighting force, only to be set upon and slaughtered. The conflicts arising from the introduction of the European fur trade came to be known as the Beaver Wars. Fought between the Iroquois and the Algonquins, the Hurons, and the French, they lasted nearly a century. Though the Iroquois eventually proved victorious throughout those wars, the Moheakans kept finding themselves on the losing side against the Mohawk.
By 1629, the Mohawk had claimed territory along the western bank of the Hudson that had long been Moheakin land. Faced with constant attack, most Moheakans began migrating east, away from their homeland and into western Massachusetts and Connecticut. A large contingent of Moheakans settled in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where Europeans began referring to them as the Stockbridge Indians. Chief of this tribe, Etow OhKoam, eventually traveled across the Atlantic to meet Queen Anne of Great Britain.
But the voyage must have been humiliating. He was just one of four Native American chiefs who met the Queen—and the other three were from his tribe’s mortal enemy, the Mohawk. Worse still, the group was collectively referred to in English history books as “the four Mohawk kings,” erasing his Moheakin heritage entirely. In Stockbridge, the Moheakans began allowing Protestant missionaries to live among them, including renowned preacher and philosopher Jonathan Edwards.
By the 18th century, some Moheakans converted to Christianity while integrating many of their own traditions into their new faith. The Stockbridge Moheakans maintained a close relationship with European settlers, fighting alongside the British in the French and Indian War and later siding with the colonists during the American Revolution. The Moravian Church, a Protestant denomination dating back to before the days of Martin Luther, also established ties with the Stockbridge Moheakans. A Moravian missionary named Henry Rauch’s message reached many of their ranks, and the first Moheakin Moravian chapel was built in 1742.
The Moravian missionaries fought for their Moheakin followers as European colonists continually encroached on Moheakin land and exposed them to vices like alcohol. When the colonists inevitably took over the land, they expelled the missionaries from New York in retaliation. But the Church survived, largely through its many missions established during the age of colonization. While the Iroquois, including the Mohawk, sided with the British during the American Revolution because they feared losing their lands if the colonists won, the Moheakans already had a long-established relationship with the colonists and sided with the Patriots instead.
That decision came at a terrible price. In 1778, the Stockbridge Moheakans lost 40 warriors in a British attack—half of their already dwindling numbers. And when the fighting stopped with America victorious, how were they rewarded? Like many other tribes in the region, they were forced westward.
The Stockbridge Moheakans had to settle in central New York among the Oneida people, who had been granted a 300,000 acre reservation for fighting for the Americans. They tried to maintain their culture at New Stockbridge, but the growth of the United States forced them to move on once more. And this time it was a much longer trip. In the early 19th century, most Stockbridge Moheakans were resettled in Shawano County, Wisconsin under the US’s policy of Indian removal.
The Munsee tribe of the Lenape, another Algonquin-speaking group, joined together with the Moheakans in Wisconsin, forming the Stockbridge-Munsee community that persists there to this day. In recent decades, Moheakin leaders have begun filing land claims against New York. In 2011, the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of the Moheakin Indians reclaimed ownership of 156 acres of land along the Hudson River in Rensselaer County, New York, near the site of their former capital. Part of the land they reclaimed was Papa’s Island, an important ceremonial site before a Dutch merchant purchased it in 1637.
The Moheakans were immortalized in literature through James Fenimore Cooper’s novel “The Last of the Moheakans,” though not entirely accurately. Cooper actually based the Native Americans in his novel on the Moheegan tribe, a distinct Algonquin group that lived in Connecticut. Any speaker of Moheegan would quickly realize that many of the names in the novel, like Uncas, are Moheegan, not Moheakin. Today, around 30,000 members of the Moheakin tribe remain, mostly in Wisconsin.
Their tumultuous history meant that their unique dialect of the Algonquin language went extinct early in the 20th century. However, renewed cultural interest in the 21st century has led to a vibrant reconnection to the indigenous language. Thanks to revival efforts, for the first time in nearly a century, there are Moheakin children learning their native tongue as their first language. The connection between the Moheakans and the Dutch colonists in the early days of European contact can still be seen today.
Anthony Kiedis, lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, has Moheakin blood through his grandmother, Molly Vanderbeek. The family initially thought Molly was English, French, Irish, and Dutch before discovering her Moheakin heritage.