Siouan

The Siouan or Siouan–Catawban family comprises around twenty indigenous languages spread across the North American Great Plains, the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and the southeastern Piedmont. Its Catawban branch, once spoken in the Carolinas, diverged early from the Western Siouan languages, which include Dakota, Chiwere and Dhegiha.

Dhegiha speakers farmed and hunted along the lower Missouri and Mississippi, while Chiwere belonged to the Iowa, Otoe and Missouria. Before the 1600s the Dakota lived as woodland hunters and wild-rice gatherers around Lake Superior.

The long Dakota–Ojibwe war of the 1700s drove them west onto the plains, where horses turned the Lakota into mounted bison hunters. The Tutelo of Virginia and the Crow of Montana show how widely Siouan peoples had scattered by the colonial era.