Sioux. The Sioux or Oceti Sakowin are groups of Native American tribes and First Nations peoples in North America. The term Sioux is an exonym created from a French transcription of the Ojibwe term Nadouessioux, and can refer to any ethnic group within the Great Sioux Nation or to any of the nation's many language dialects. Before the 17th century, the Santee Dakota lived around Lake Superior with territories in present-day northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. They gathered wild rice, hunted woodland animals and used canoes to fish. Wars with the Ojibwe throughout the 1700s pushed the Dakota into southern Minnesota, where the Western Dakota and Teton were residing. In the 1800s, the Dakota signed treaties with the United States, ceding much of their land in Minnesota. Failure of the United States to make treaty payments on time, as well as low food supplies, led to the Dakota War of 1862, which resulted in the Dakota being exiled from Minnesota to numerous reservations in Nebraska, North and South Dakota and Canada. After 1870, the Dakota people began to return to Minnesota, creating the present-day reservations in the state. The Yankton and Yanktonai Dakota, collectively also referred to by the endonym, resided in the Minnesota River area before ceding their land and moving to South Dakota in 1858. Despite ceding their lands, their treaty with the U.S. They are considered to be the Western Dakota, and have in the past been erroneously classified as Nakota. The actual Nakota are the Assiniboine and Stoney of Western Canada and Montana. The Lakota, also called Teton, are the westernmost Sioux, known for their hunting and warrior culture. With the arrival of the horse in the 1700s, the Lakota would become the most powerful tribe on the Plains by the 1850s. They fought the United States Army in the Sioux Wars including defeating the 7th Cavalry Regiment at the Battle of Little Big Horn. The armed conflicts with the U.S. ended with the Wounded Knee Massacre. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the Dakota and Lakota would continue to fight for their treaty rights, including the Wounded Knee incident, Dakota Access Pipeline protests and the 1980 Supreme Court case, United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, in which the court ruled that tribal lands covered under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 had been taken illegally by the US government, and the tribe was owed compensation plus interest. As of 2018, this amounted to more than $1 billion; the Sioux have refused the payment, demanding instead the return of their land. Today, the Sioux maintain many separate tribal governments scattered across several reservations, communities, and reserves in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Montana in the United States; and Manitoba, southern Saskatchewan, and Alberta in Canada. Each fire is a symbol of an oyate. They are also referred to as the Lakota or Dakota as based upon dialect differences. In any of the dialects, Lakota or Dakota translates to mean friend or ally referring to the alliances between the bands. The name Sioux was adopted in English by the 1760s from French. It is abbreviated from the French Nadouessioux, first attested by Jean Nicolet in 1640. The name is sometimes said to be derived from Nadowessi, an Ojibwe exonym for the Sioux meaning little snakes. The French pluralized the Ojibwe singular Nadowessi by adding the French plural suffix oux to form Nadowessioux, which was later shortened to Sioux.