Whapetunwan

The Whapetunwan, or Wahpeton, are one of the four Eastern Dakota bands of the Santee within the Sioux Seven Council Fires, and their name means Leaf Village. They were the constant allies of the Sisseton, with whom they shared villages and councils and who were later grouped with them as the Upper Sioux.

In the seventeenth century they lived in the forests southwest of Lake Superior, gathering wild rice, spearing fish from canoes and hunting woodland game, until the musket-armed Ojibwe and the long Dakota-Ojibwe War drove them toward the prairies of southern Minnesota.

In April 1806 their chiefs joined those of the Sisseton and Mdewakanton, five hundred warriors in all, in a council with the American officer Zebulon Pike at the mouth of the Minnesota River.