Definition of "Merkin"

How he envied the Merkin people who could live in such bungalows! Yet for most of the year the bungalows were empty, with doors padlocked and windows shuttered. It was only during the "hill season," the two or three months between the northeast and the southwest monsoons, that the Merkin people left their homes and schools and missions on the plains and came to the hills to escape the heat.

1960, Shirley L[ease] Arora, What Then, Raman?, Chicago, I.L.: Follett Publishing Company, page 16

The big river sang and glittered in the sunlight. It toppled from the mysterious jungle heights of Irukandji territory down huge granite bluffs to hurtle life into the parched inland, tracking westward through the lands of the fierce Merkin tribe.

1992, Patricia Shaw, River of the Sun, New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, page 3

A tribe known as the Merkins had a word, "talgoro" meaning "human-meat-waiting-to-be-taken"; what we would call a "marked man".

2008, Carole A. Travis-Henikoff, Dinner With a Cannibal: The Complete History of Mankind's Oldest Taboo, Santa Monica, C.A.: Santa Monica Press, page 188