Dakota

The Dakota group is the Sioux, who call themselves the Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires, and speak the closely related Dakota, Lakota and Nakota dialects, a name meaning friend or ally. They include the Eastern Dakota, or Santee, the Yankton and Yanktonai, and the western Lakota. Before the seventeenth century the Santee lived around Lake Superior, gathering wild rice and fishing from canoes.

In wars through the 1700s the Ojibwe, armed with French and British muskets, drove the Dakota south and west into southern Minnesota and onto the prairies. In the same century the horse made the Lakota a powerful people of the Northern Plains.