Kahokiaki

The Kahokiaki, known in French records as the Cahokia, were an Algonquian-speaking tribe of the Illinois Confederation, their Miami-Illinois name giving this entry its title. From the sixteenth century they reoccupied the region of the long-abandoned city of Cahokia on the Mississippi, though they were not descendants of the Mississippian mound builders who had lived there before; their villages lay across western Illinois and eastern Missouri alongside the Tamaroa.

After the French explorers Jolliet and Marquette reached them in 1673, missionaries founded the Tamaroa-Cahokia mission in 1699 when the two tribes consolidated at Cahokia, and in 1735 the Kahokiaki built a village beside Monks Mound.

In 1752 British-allied Shawnee and Meskwaki warriors sacked their main settlement, survivors taking refuge with the Michigamea. Warfare and disease so reduced the tribe that its remnant was absorbed first by the Kaskaskia and then by the Peoria, whose descendants carry the heritage.