Nation was pursuing land claims with the Canadian government to regain lost land. The modern claim touches the municipalities of Saint-Constant, Sainte-Catherine, Saint-Mathieu, Delson, Candiac and Saint-Philippe. Led by the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake and the reserve's Inter-governmental Relations Team, the community has filed claims with the government of Canada. It is seeking monetary compensation and symbolic recognition of its claim. Multi-cultural community Kahnawake was settled by a variety of historic indigenous peoples, although the Mohawk became by far the majority. They and other tribes had a practice of adopting captives into the tribe, often to replace people lost to illness or warfare. They generally chose to adopt young women and children taken in raids, as these were believed to be more amenable to assimilation. Individual families adopted such captives, and made them full members of their clan and tribe. The practice preceded European encounter, but later some European captives were also assimilated as Mohawk. The Mohawk had a matrilineal kinship system, with children considered born into the clan of the mother and deriving their status from her family. There was some European settlement after the reserve land was "donated" by the French Crown in the mid-17th century. The French government stationed French colonial troops there (who formed liaisons with local women and had children by them). Shopkeepers also formed families, and through the 18th century, many marriages occurred between European men and Indian women. Multiracial children born to Mohawk mothers were readily assimilated into the mother's family, clan, and nation. During the 17th and early 18th centuries, the English and French were competing in North America and in Europe. Together with allied First Nations or Native American tribes, they conducted raids along the undefined border between the territories of New France and New England. Captives were sometimes held for ransom, and European families and communities worked to buy them back. In some cases, families of the indigenous communities kept captives for adoption. For instance, more than 100 captives were taken during the 1704 Raid on Deerfield; they were forced overland to Montreal and Kahnawake. The minister of Deerfield was ransomed, but his teenage daughter was kept by a Mohawk family. She ultimately married a Mohawk man and had a family with him, choosing to stay with her new family rather than return to Deerfield. As a result of this history, many Kahnawake people have been of mixed ancestry but