The Mohawk or Mohawk River people were a tribe or band of the Kalapuya, who originally lived in the

Mohawk River The Mohawk River is a U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed October 3, 2011 river in the U.S. state of New York. It is the largest tributary of the Hudson River. The Mohawk ...

area of present-day

Oregon Oregon () is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of it ...

in the United States. They spoke a dialect of the

Central Kalapuya language Central Kalapuyan was a Kalapuyan language indigenous to the central and southern Willamette Valley in Oregon in the United States. It was spoken by various bands of the Kalapuya peoples who inhabited the valley up through the middle of the 19t ...

. Like the other bands of the Kalapuya, the Mohawk signed the

Treaty with the Kalapuya, etc. The Treaty with the Kalapuya, etc., also known as the Kalapuya Treaty or the Treaty of Dayton, was an 1855 treaty between the United States and the bands of the Kalapuya tribe, the Molala tribe, the Clackamas, and several others in the Oregon T ...

in 1855 with the United States, also known as the

Dayton Dayton () is the sixth-largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Montgomery County. A small part of the city extends into Greene County. The 2020 U.S. census estimate put the city population at 137,644, while Greater Da ...

Treaty, which was negotiated by

Oregon Superintendent of Indian Affairs The Oregon Superintendent of Indian Affairs was an official position of the U.S. state of Oregon, and previously of the Oregon Territory, that existed from 1848–1873. Background The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was created in 1824 to regulate ...

Joel Palmer General Joel Palmer (October 4, 1810 – June 9, 1881) was an American pioneer of the Oregon Territory in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. He was born in Canada, and spent his early years in New York and Pennsylvania before serving ...

. In 1856, they were removed to the

Grand Ronde Indian Reservation The Grand Ronde Community is an Indian reservation located on several non-contiguous sections of land in southwestern Yamhill County and northwestern Polk County, Oregon, United States, about east of Lincoln City, near the community of Gran ...

, joining members of numerous other tribes and bands. Although the combined tribe was terminated in 1954, members later reorganized. They regained federal recognition in 1983 as of the

Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon The Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon (CTGR) consists of twenty-seven Native American tribes with long historical ties to present-day western Oregon between the western boundary of the Oregon Coast and the eastern boundar ...

, to which Mohawk descendants belong. They have a reservation in Yamhill and Polk counties.

References

Lane County, Oregon Kalapuya {{NorthAm-native-stub