The Mahican (also spelled Mohican) were a Native American people who lived in the Hudson River Valley of what is now New York State. For centuries before European colonization, they built villages, farmed corn and beans, hunted deer, and fished in the rivers that ran through their territory. The Mahican Confederacy included several related villages and tribes that shared language and customs.

When Dutch traders arrived in the early 1600s, the Mahican became important partners in the fur trade, exchanging beaver pelts for European goods. However, European settlement brought devastating changes: diseases like smallpox killed many Mahican people, and colonists pushed them off their ancestral lands. By the 1700s, most Mahican had moved westward, and many eventually settled in Wisconsin, where the Stockbridge-Munsee Community continues today as a federally recognized tribe.

Don't confuse them with the Mohegan, who were a separate tribe in Connecticut. James Fenimore Cooper's famous 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans actually mixed up these two tribes, but it captured Americans' imagination and kept the Mahican name in popular memory.