Chiwere

The Chiwere group includes the Iowa, Otoe and Missouria, who spoke the Siouan language Chiwere, together with the closely related Ho-Chunk. The three Chiwere peoples were once part of the Ho-Chunk and came from the Great Lakes region. They left their homelands in southern Wisconsin for eastern Iowa, the state that bears the name of one of them, and later spread through the Midwest and the plains.

The name Chiwere means ‘the home dialect’. The language was first recorded by missionaries in the 1830s, and in 1837 the Iowa were moved from Iowa to reservations in Kansas and Nebraska.