Author: U.S. Secretary of the Interior
Title: Report of the Secretary of the Interior, Relative to the Claim of the Brotherton Indians
Description: Washington DC, 33rd Congress, 2d Session (Ex. Doc. No. 45), 1855. Softcover. 28 pp. Senate Report. Some browning to edges and a few stains to first page. Brothertown (also Brotherton) Indians, located in Wisconsin, are a native American tribe formed in the early nineteenth century from communities iof several Pequot and Mohegan (Algonquian-speaking) tribes of southern New England and eastern Long Island, New York..Under pressure from the U.S. government, along with the Stockbridge-Munsee and some Oneida, they removed to Wiconsin in the 1830s, taking ships through the Great Lakes. In 1839, they were the first tribe of Native Americans in the United States to accept United States citizenship and have their communal land allocated to individual households, in order to prevent another removal to points further west. As part of the Indian termination policy that the US government adopted in the late 1940s and applied into the 1960s, it identified several former New York tribes for termination, with the thought they no longer needed a special relationship with the federal government. A January 21, 1954 memo by the Department of the Interior advised that a bill for termination was being prepared including "about 3,600 members of the Oneida Tribe residing in Wisconsin Because of this, in the view of the acting Assistant Secretary of the Interior ruled that the Brothertown Indians could not satisfy one of the seven mandatory criteria for federal acknowledgment, they were not able (as of 2013) to regain their tribal status. They are one of eleven tribes listed in Wisconsin and the only one which is not federally recognized. The tribe is estimated to have over 4000 members. Good .

Keywords: