Mingo

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This article is about the Native American tribe. For other uses, see Mingo (disambiguation).

The Mingo are an Iroquois group of Native Americans that migrated west to the Ohio Country in the mid-eighteenth century. Anglo-Americans called these migrants mingos, a corruption of mingwe, an Algonquian word meaning "stealthy" or "treacherous".^[1] Mingos have also been known as "Ohio Iroquois" and "Ohio Seneca".

1 History
2 Language
3 References
4 External links

[edit] History

Statue of Logan, the famous Mingo headman, in Logan, West Virginia.

The people who became known as "Mingos" migrated to the Ohio Country in the mid-eighteenth century, part of an influx of Native Americans to a region that had been sparsely populated for decades. Their villages were increasingly an amalgamation of Seneca, Wyandot, Shawnee, Susquehannock, and Delaware immigrants. Although the Iroquois nominally claimed sovereignty over the Ohio country natives, these people increasingly acted independently of them. When Pontiac's Rebellion broke out in 1763, many Mingos joined with other tribes in the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to drive the British out of the Ohio Country, even though the Iroquois were closely allied to the British. The Mingo/Seneca Chief Guyasuta was one of the leaders in that war.

One of the most famous Mingo leaders was Chief Logan, who had good relations with his fellow white settlers. Logan was not actually a chief, but a village leader. In 1774, as tensions between whites and Indians were on the rise due to a series of violent encounters, Logan's family was brutally murdered by a band of white outlaws. Local chiefs counseled restraint, but acknowledged Logan's right to revenge. Logan exacted his vengeance in a series of raids with only about a dozen followers, not all of whom were Mingos. His vengeance satisfied, he did not even participate in the resulting Lord Dunmore's War, and was probably not at the climactic Battle of Point Pleasant. Rather than participate in the peace conference, he issued Logan's Lament, a speech which was widely printed and is one of the most well-known examples of American Indian oratory.

By 1830, the Mingos were flourishing in western Ohio improving their farms and establishing schools. After the passage of the Indian Removal Act of that same year, however, the Mingos were pressured to sell their lands and emigrate to Kansas in 1832. In Kansas, the Mingos were joined by Seneca bands and both tribes shared the Neosho Reservation there. The tribe moved yet again in 1869 after the American Civil War to present-day Ottawa County, Oklahoma. In 1937, the tribe officially designated themselves the Seneca-Cayuga Tribe of Oklahoma. Today, the tribe numbers over twenty-four hundred members and continues to maintain cultural and religious ties to the Six Nations of the Iroquois. Also, Emily Latham.

[edit] Language

The Mingo language (native name: Unyææshæötká') is a Northern Iroquoian language of eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. It is a polysynthetic language with extremely complex verb usage, closely related to Seneca, Onondaga, and Cayuga. There has been increasing interest in recent years, especially among Mingo descendants, in revitalizing the language.

Mingo County, West Virginia is named for the tribe.

[edit] References

Hoxie, Frederick E., editor. Encyclopedia of North American Indians. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1996, pp. 380–381. ISBN 0-395-66921-9.
McConnell, Michael N. A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. ISBN 0-8032-3142-3.