Mingo

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The Mingo are an Iroquoian group, mainly made up of Seneca and Cayuga people, who moved from New York to the Ohio region in the mid-1700s. Some Susquehannock survivors joined them and blended in.

Their name comes from the Lenape word mingwe, meaning stealthy. They were also called the Ohio Iroquois or the Ohio Seneca.

In Ohio, the Mingo formed mixed villages with other tribes, including Wyandot, Susquehannock, Tutelo, Shawnee, and Delaware. Their dialect was similar to the Seneca language.

They played roles in Pontiac’s War after the French and Indian War. Guyasuta, a Mingo-Seneca chief, was a leader in those efforts. Logan, a famous Mingo leader, is known for Logan’s Lament after his family was killed in 1774; he was a village leader, not a war chief.

By 1830, the Mingo were thriving in western Ohio, but the federal government forced them to leave their lands and move west of the Mississippi to Kansas in 1832. In 1869 they moved again to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). In 1902, the government divided communal lands into individual allotments to encourage assimilation, which reduced their landholdings.

In 1937, after the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act, the descendants reorganized as the Seneca–Cayuga Tribe of Oklahoma and gained federal recognition. Today there are more than 5,000 members, and they maintain cultural ties to the Six Nations of the Iroquois, based mainly in Ontario.

Some Six Nations also have reservations in New York. Logan and the Mingo are featured in the Gothic novel Logan (1822), which uses Indigenous figures to critique imperialism.