Kanien'kehaka

The Kanien'kehaka, the People of the Flint Place, known to English colonists as the Mohawk, are the easternmost nation of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy. Their homeland was the Mohawk Valley. In the confederacy's founding tradition Hiawatha and the Great Peacemaker united five warring nations under the Great Law of Peace.

In 1609 Samuel de Champlain and his Wendat allies shot Mohawk chiefs near Ticonderoga, opening the Beaver Wars. The Mohawk dominated the fur trade after driving the Mohican eastward in 1628, until a smallpox epidemic in 1635 cut their numbers by nearly two thirds.

During the American Revolutionary War they sided with Britain under war chief Joseph Brant, and the Sullivan Expedition of 1779 burned Haudenosaunee villages. Most Mohawk lost their New York lands and moved to Canada, where Brant founded the Six Nations of the Grand River settlement.