Ouiatenon

Ouiatenon (Miami-Illinois: waayaahtanonki) was a dwelling place of members of the Wea tribe of Native Americans. The name Ouiatenon, also variously given as Ouiatanon, Oujatanon, Ouiatano or other similar forms, is a French rendering of a term from the Wea dialect of the Miami-Illinois language which means "place of the people of the whirlpool", an ethnonym for the Wea. Ouiatenon can be said to refer generally to any settlement of Wea or to their tribal lands as a whole, though the name is most frequently used to refer to a group of extinct settlements situated together along the Wabash River in what is now western Tippecanoe County, Indiana.

History

Establishment

By the late 17th century the Miami speaking peoples, of which the Wea were a part, had begun to return to their homelands in the Wabash River Valley, an area they had earlier been driven from by the eastern Iroquois. The several tribal bands of Miami separated as they settled the valley, with the Wea occupying the middle Wabash Valley between the Eel River in the north and the Vermilion River in the south. Of the Wea's five major settlements, Ouiatenon was the largest concentration; it was described in August 1791 by U.S. General James Wilkinson as "the chief town of the Ouiatenon Nation."