Hidden Literacies

Who and Where Were the Munsees

     The ancestors of the present-day Munsees lived in a region straddling the Delaware and Hudson River watersheds, taking in what is now northern New Jersey and New York Harbor. They were related culturally and linguistically to the peoples in regions to the south and north, but as they consolidated into a national entity during the early colonial era, the Munsees or Minisinks (People of the Stony Country) remained distinct from the Lenapes or Delawares (of whom they are sometimes described as a “branch”) and the Mahicans. Like their neighbors, they were dispossessed of their homelands, and forced into a series of removes north, east, and west in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries. A large body of Munsees converted to Christianity through the Moravian Church, and most of these moved to Canada during the American Revolution. Contemporary communities are the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown and the Delaware-Munsee Nation, both in Ontario, Canada, and the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians in Wisconsin.1
     A mixed band of Munsee and Mahican Christians belonging to the Moravian Church migrated from Canada to the Delaware Reservation in Indian Territory in 1837, where they were joined a year later by Stockbridge and Brotherton Munsees from Wisconsin.2  In the 1849 memorial, they complained about their treatment by the Delawares, who had sold the tract they lived on out from under them. They requested a tract of their own in Indian territory. They complained that they had been deprived of their share of annuities from the Treaty of Fort Industry

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