The Brotherton Migration In a twenty-year span from 1780 to 1800, the Native population in southern New England fell by as much as half -- not as a result of war or disease, but as a result of a religious movement called the Brotherton Migration. The movement grew from the missionary work of Samson Occum, a Mohegan Indian and Methodist minister whose teachings blended Christian faith with practical strategies to ensure his people's survival.  In the 1770s, Occum had begun promoting a plan to establish self-sufficient Native farming communities removed from the vices of white society.  Residents of these new towns would live by Christian principles, including temperance and a strong work ethic. The Impact of Occum’s Message “Occum absolutely recognized that staying in New England surrounded by Europeans would be the death of Native culture,” says Dr. Kevin McBride of the University of Connecticut and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center.  “He wanted his people to prosper, and he wanted them to leave the area and establish themselves further to the west along the frontier.” The frontier in Occum's time was western New York State, where the Oneida Indians donated more than 6,000 acres for the new Brotherton settlement.  The community became firmly established with a group of settlers who arrived in 1784.  In the years following the Revolutionary War, reservations throughout New England began to empty out as the migration to Brotherton got underway. “Half to three quarters of the Pequots at Mashantucket left,” says Dr. McBride.  “All of Indiantown abandoned the reservation, and a good half of the other farmsteads were abandoned as well.” Over the 45 years following the first settlement, emigrants to Brothertown included Mashantucket and Pawcatuck Pequots, Narragansetts, Eastern and Western Niantics, Mohegans, Montauks, and Tunxis.  While a small and weakened Pequot tribe struggled to hold on at Mashantucket in the decades ahead, even the Brothertons hundreds of miles to the west could not escape the demand of whites for Indian land.  Forced to migrate yet again by a growing wave of American settlers, the Brotherton Indians moved west to Wisconsin in the 1830s, where their descendants still live today.