Native American Tribes

The History and Culture of the Mohegans

By: Jay Moore, Charles River Editors

Narrated by: Colin Fluxman

From the Trail of Tears to Wounded Knee and Little Bighorn, the narrative of American history is incomplete without the inclusion of the Native Americans who lived on the continent before European settlers arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries. Since the first contact between natives and settlers, tribes like the Sioux, Cherokee, and Navajo have both fascinated and perplexed outsiders with their history, language, and culture. In Charles River Editors' Native American Tribes series, listeners can get caught up to speed on the history and culture of North America's most famous native tribes in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known.

Among all the Native American tribes, the Mohegan people are some of the most well documented Native Americans in history. Indigenous to the northeast region of what is now the United States, they were among some of the earliest contacts Europeans had with the native tribes. And yet they have remained a constant source of mystery.

When European settlers began to colonize areas like Plymouth and New Amsterdam, they quickly came into contact with various natives, including the southeast Connecticut based Mohegan, who were once part of a unified tribe with the Pequot but now considered that group a mortal enemy. In fact, the entangled nature of the tribes meant that European colonists who could barely distinguish between the groups often found themselves in makeshift alliances, and during the Pequot War in the 1630s, the Pequot were nearly wiped out.

Though the Mohegan helped the colonists during that war and benefited from it, the tribe itself would begin to languish as the United States expanded. By the 20th century, the Mohegan tribe was on the verge of having its last native speaker die, and suffering the extinction of their original language. Fortunately, anthropologists and some of the Mohegans remaining helped to keep their culture and language alive, and today there is a federally recognized Mohegan tribe that lives on a reservation near their original homeland in Connecticut.

©2016 Charles River Editors (P)2016 Charles River Editors