Sisithunwan

The Sisithunwan, or Sisseton, are one of the four Eastern Dakota bands of the Santee, the eastern member of the Sioux Seven Council Fires, and their name has been read as Fish Scale Village or Swamp Village.

Before the seventeenth century their villages stood along the wooded shores of Lake Superior and in what is now northern Wisconsin, where they harvested wild rice, fished from birch-bark canoes and hunted deer and moose.

Throughout the eighteenth century the Dakota-Ojibwe War, in which their enemies carried French and British muskets, pushed the Sisseton steadily west into southern Minnesota. In April 1806 more than forty Sisseton, Wahpeton and Mdewakanton chiefs, with five hundred tribesmen, met the American officer Zebulon Pike at the mouth of the Minnesota River, an early council in the treaty-making that opened their country to United States traders.