Ithaktunwan

The Ithaktunwan, anglicized as Yankton and meaning 'village at the end', were one of two Western Dakota tribes of the Sioux Seven Council Fires, paired with Yanktonai as Wičhíyena, 'those who speak like men'.

In the eighteenth century they lived along the Minnesota and Blue Earth rivers around Mankato in southwest Minnesota, closer to the Plains than the Santee Dakota. Like other Sioux they had been pushed west from the Lake Superior woodlands by wars with the Ojibwe and Cree, and the long Dakota-Ojibwe war cost the Dakota their Leech Lake and Mille Lacs villages in 1736.

The Western Dakota traded with the French from the late seventeenth century and took increasingly to mounted bison hunting. Within the Sioux nation the Yankton and Yanktonai were the caretakers of the Pipestone Quarry, whose red stone became the sacred pipes of all the Sioux bands.