Wea

The Wea were a Miami-Illinois-speaking people of western Indiana, counted either as a subtribe of the Miami or as their close kin. Their autonym Waayaahtanwa comes from waayaahtanonki, the place of the whirlpool, the village where French writers first recorded them in 1673.

In the early eighteenth century they settled the middle Wabash Valley, with their chief town of Ouiatenon near Lafayette; the French built Fort Ouiatenon there to trade with them and the Kickapoo, and the related Pepikokia band merged into them in 1742. The Wea joined Pontiac's War against the British in 1763 and later fought beside the Miami in the Revolutionary War and subsequent frontier conflicts.

Under United States removal policy they were forced across the Mississippi into Missouri and Arkansas in 1820. The surviving Wea merged with the Kaskaskia, Piankeshaw and Peoria into the Confederated Peoria.