One afternoon in 1700, your tribe’s hunters are busy chasing down buffalo. You can feel the ground shaking under the animals’ pounding hooves.
You don’t remember living anywhere else but this camp on the wide-open plains, though your uncle does. As you and your big brother sit with him in the family tepee, he says, “We have always hunted the buffalo, but not so long ago, we lived in villages, and some of us were farmers.” You look at your brother and wonder, what happened?
Long before European settlers came to the Midwest, Native American groups already lived there. The Sioux (SOO) were one of those groups. Back then, the Interior Plains were full of buffalo, and tribes like the Sioux depended on these animals. In the Central Plains, the Sioux lived in villages along lakes and rivers where they farmed crops and hunted game in the forests. When the settlers arrived, life for Sioux tribes, such as the Lakota, began to change.
