Taneks

Taneks, or Tanêksa, is the autonym of the people better known to Europeans as the Biloxi, speakers of an Ohio Valley Siouan language closely related to Tutelo and Ofo. Linguists place the early homeland of these Siouan-speaking peoples in the Ohio River valley, before southward migrations scattered their kin toward the Gulf.

By the time Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville met them on the Pascagoula River in 1699, they were a coast people, descendants of the mound-building Mississippian societies. D'Iberville heard that the once numerous nation had been shattered by a smallpox epidemic that left whole villages empty.

Through the eighteenth century the surviving Biloxi drifted into central Louisiana, and in 1828 twenty families pushed on to the Neches River in Texas. The remnant eventually merged with the Tunica and other displaced peoples, carrying their Siouan tongue with them.