Mohawks

The Mohawks are presented as a people within the Six Nations whose military alliances and reputation become part of the novel’s contested account of Indigenous politics. Although some characters praise or condemn them in sweeping terms, the narrative places them in a changing network of British, French, and intertribal relationships rather than a single, fixed camp.

Identity and Military Alliances

Early in the story, Alice is told that the party’s guide is a Mohawk serving the British as a friend. The same account says he had previously served alongside the British-allied Mohawks and connects his arrival among them to an earlier incident involving Alice’s father. This establishes Mohawk service as one avenue through which Indigenous fighters participate in the British war effort, while also showing that individual identity and allegiance may be treated as uncertain by outsiders.

The novel complicates that account through Hawkeye’s distrustful claim that a person born a Mingo will remain one, regardless of a claimed Mohawk affiliation. Elsewhere, he condemns the Mohawks and Oneidas as unreliable and argues that the Delawares would make more trustworthy allies. These are character judgments, not neutral descriptions: the text also identifies Mohawks as British friends and emphasizes that wartime loyalties have been disrupted by colonial policy and older rivalries.

Conflict and Historical Memory

The abandoned blockhouse preserves a history of conflict between the Mohawks and the Delawares. Hawkeye recalls that he helped the Delawares defend the site during a prolonged confrontation, describing a struggle that lasted forty days and nights before the defenders emerged victorious. The decaying fort turns that little-recorded episode into a material reminder of Indigenous warfare that, in Hawkeye’s account, received little place in written histories.

Hawkeye disputes the assumption that the Delawares were simply a peaceful people who left fighting to the Mohawks. He attributes their earlier political subordination to a treaty imposed through Dutch influence and says that the Mohicans did not accept the same arrangement. His version presents the Mohawks as participants in a political order that limited the Delawares’ military standing, while his recollection of the blockhouse gives the Delawares an active role in resisting that order.

Shifting Allegiances and Narrative Significance

The narrator describes a broader confusion of alliances: Delawares and people identified as Mingoes can fight in the same ranks, while the Mingoes also pursue conflict with the Hurons. The Delawares themselves are divided, and the Mohican Sagamore’s small following serves the British while much of his people’s nation is allied with Montcalm. Against this background, the Mohawks’ British connection is one strand in a fractured political landscape, not evidence of a unified Indigenous position.

The Mohawks’ recurring presence in disputes over loyalty, military service, and historical memory exposes the limits of the characters’ broad ethnic judgments. The novel gives competing speakers grounds for their claims but also shows how colonial alliances and intertribal conflict complicate any simple division between friend and enemy.