Tiou

The Tiou, also written Tioux, were a Tunica-speaking people of the lower Mississippi Valley whose ancestors had lived further upriver until the collapse of the Mississippian chiefdoms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Together with the Grigra they were adopted into the Natchez tribe and became one of its village districts, keeping their own settlement on lower St. Catherine's Creek beside the Grand Village of the Natchez.

French observers counted the Tioux village among the districts friendly to the French. When the Natchez revolt of 1729 to 1731 ended in the destruction of the chiefdom, several hundred Natchez were shipped to Caribbean sugar plantations as slaves and the survivors scattered among the Chickasaw, Muscogee and Cherokee; the Tiou disappeared from the records as a distinct group, merged into the Natchez refugees and their hosts.