The Mahican and the Great Wigwam

Long before it was called Great Barrington, this land belonged to the Mahican people, part of a network of communities along the Housatonic and Hudson river valleys. The Mahican name for the area, Mahaiwe, is usually translated as the place downstream. The Mahican managed these floodplains and forests for countless generations, fishing the river, tending crops of corn, beans, and squash, and moving with the seasons.

Over the following generations, disease, warfare, and the steady pressure of English settlement pushed many native families westward. In the seventeen thirties, colonial authorities and missionaries gathered Mahican and other river peoples into a mission town at nearby Stockbridge, and they became known as the Stockbridge Indians. Over the following century they were pushed farther and farther from their homeland, first to New York, then to Wisconsin, where their descendants live today as the Stockbridge Munsee Band of Mohican Indians.

Their name endures across this landscape, in the river called Housatonic, in the word Mahaiwe, and in the very ground beneath the town, a reminder that this valley was home long before the first English deed was signed.