The Siouan Indians

The Siouan Indians
A Preliminary Sketch - Fifteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1893-1894, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1897, pages 153-204
by W. J. McGee
Edition 1, (October 23, 2006)
BY W.J. McGEE



Out of some sixty aboriginal stocks or families found in North America above the Tropic of Cancer, about five-sixths were confined to the tenth of the territory bordering Pacific ocean; the remaining nine-tenths of the land was occupied by a few strong stocks, comprising the Algonquian, Athapascan, Iroquoian, Shoshonean, Siouan, and others of more limited extent.
The Indians of the Siouan stock occupied the central portion of the continent. They were preeminently plains Indians, ranging from Lake Michigan to the Rocky mountains, and from the Arkansas to the Saskatchewan, while an outlying body stretched to the shores of the Atlantic. They were typical American barbarians, headed by hunters and warriors and grouped in shifting tribes led by the chase or driven by battle from place to place over their vast and naturally rich domain, though a crude agriculture sprang up whenever a tribe tarried long in one spot. No native stock is more interesting than the great Siouan group, and none save the Algonquian and Iroquoian approach it in wealth of literary and historical records; for since the advent of white men the Siouan Indians have played striking rôles on the stage of human development, and have caught the eye of every thoughtful observer.
In colloquial usage and in the usage of the ephemeral press, the term Sioux was applied sometimes to one but oftener to several of the allied tribes embraced in the first of the principal groups of which the stock is composed, i.e., the group or confederacy styling themselves Dakota. Sometimes the term was employed in its simple form, but as explorers and pioneers gained an inkling of the organization of the group, it was often compounded with the tribal name as Santee-Sioux, Yanktonnai-Sioux, Sisseton-Sioux, etc. As acquaintance between white men and red increased, the stock name was gradually displaced by tribe names until the colloquial appellation Sioux became but a memory or tradition throughout much of the territory formerly dominated by the great Siouan stock. One of the reasons for the abandonment of the name was undoubtedly its inappropriateness as a designation for the confederacy occupying the plains of the upper Missouri, since it was an alien and opprobrious designation for a people bearing a euphonious appellation of their own. Moreover, colloquial usage was gradually influenced by the usage of scholars, who accepted the native name for the Dakota (spelled Dahcota by Gallatin) confederacy, as well as the tribal names adopted by Gallatin, Prichard, and others. Thus the ill-defined term Sioux has dropped out of use in the substantive form, and is retained, in the adjective form only, to designate a great stock to which no other collective name, either intern or alien, has ever been definitely and justly applied.