The Sioux before 1500

The ancestors of the Sioux people lived on the west side of the Great Lakes (modern Minnesota), as early as the Paleo-Indian period, about 10,000 BC. They did not call themselves the Sioux (that's a French-Canadian insult for them meaning "snakes"), but Lakota or Dakota.

Sioux people were hunters and gatherers. The Sioux (pronounced SOO) ate mainly wild rice, like their neighbors the Cree. They also hunted deer and small animals like rabbits, and they gathered berries and bird eggs and wild plants, in addition to gathering wild rice.

By the Woodland period, about 1000 BC, Sioux people built burial mounds near their villages, like the Hopewell people to their east.

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