Mohawk SVG is a North American Indian tribe that was part of the Iroquois League alliance. In the League, the Mohawks are the “keepers of the eastern door”. The Mohawk language is spoken by the Iroquois language family.
Today, Mohawks are the largest people in the Iroquois League, living in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec, as well as in the American state of New York, on the border with Canada. The current number exceeds 63 thousand people (about 42 thousand in Canada and about 21.5 thousand in the United States).
Mohawks SVG History
The Dutch were the first to get acquainted with the mahoga, who sent them in 1634 a research expedition of Harmens van der Bogart, who came out of Fort Orange (now Albany, New York). Settlers of New Netherland called them maquasens (maquasen).
This now obsolete ethnonym, which in the old days was also used by the French, gained wide popularity in pre-revolutionary Russia thanks to the translation of the novel “The Last of the Mohicans” by James Fennimore Cooper (1826). The plot of this not strictly “historical” work is based on the events of the Franco-Indian War of 1757, in which the Mohawks fought with the British in alliance with the French troops of General Moncalm. Paying tribute to tradition, and also based mainly on oral sources and legends, Cooper painted macuas mainly in black colors, as well as hurons. In fact, the Mohawks, like the rest of the Iroquois tribes, were no more brutal and “treacherous” than the same Mogicans and Devils, and allied with the French because of clashes with British settlers over hunting grounds.