Brothertown Indians

The Brothertown Indians (also Brotherton), located in Wisconsin, are a Native American tribe formed in the early nineteenth century from communities of several Pequot and Mohegan (Algonquian-speaking) tribes of southern New England and eastern Long Island, New York. In the 1780s after the American Revolutionary War, they migrated from New England into New York state, where they accepted land from the Iroquois Oneida Nation in Oneida County.

Under pressure from the United States government, the Brothertown Indians, together with the Stockbridge-Munsee and some Oneida, removed to Wisconsin in the 1830s, taking ships through the Great Lakes. In 1839 they were the first tribe of Native Americans in the United States to accept United States citizenship and have their communal land allocated to individual households, in order to prevent another removal further west. Most of the Oneida and many of the Delaware were relocated to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma).

Seeking to regain recognition, the Brothertown Indians filed a documented petition in 2005. The Bureau of Indian Affairs notified the tribe in 2009 in a preliminary finding that they had not satisfied five of the seven criteria. In addition, the BIA said that the Department of Interior had reinterpreted a 1993 ruling, and determined that the 1839 act granting the Brothertown United States citizenship and allotting their communal reservation land to individual households terminated the people as a sovereign tribe. The Brothertown Indians are continuing to pursue federal recognition.

Read more about Brothertown Indians:  Federal Recognition Status, Governance, Culture

Famous quotes containing the word indians:

    The Indians knew that life was equated with the earth and its resources, that America was a paradise, and they could not comprehend why the intruders from the East were determined to destroy all that was Indian as well as America itself.
    Dee Brown (b. 1908)