Some scholars contended the Miami called themselves the Twightwee (also spelled Twatwa), supposedly an onomatopoeic reference to their sacred bird, the sandhill crane.

[6] Mississippian societies were characterized by maize-based agriculture, chiefdom-level social organization, extensive regional trade networks, hierarchical settlement patterns, and other factors.

The warfare and ensuing social disruption – along with the spread of infectious European diseases such as measles and smallpox for which they had no immunity – contributed to the decimation of Native American populations in the interior.

[8] Around the beginning of the 18th century, with support from French traders coming down from what is now Canada who supplied them with firearms and wanted to trade with them for furs, the Miami pushed back into their historical territory and resettled it.

The Miami of Kekionga remained allies of the British, but were not openly hostile to the United States (except when attacked by Augustin de La Balme in 1780).

In the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolutionary War, Britain transferred its claim of sovereignty over the Northwest Territory – modern-day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin – to the new United States.

White pioneers pushed into the Ohio Valley, leading to disputes over whether they had a legal right to carve out homesteads and settlements on land the tribes considered unceded territory.

The Miami invited tribes displaced by white settlers, the Delaware (Lenape) and Shawnee to resettle at Kekionga, forming the nucleus of the pan-tribal Western Confederacy.

Under it, confederacy leaders like Little Turtle agreed to cede most of what is now Ohio, along with other tracts to the west including what is now central Detroit, Chicago, and Fort Wayne, in exchange for annual payments.

[16] Those Miami who still resented the United States gathered around Ouiatenon and Prophetstown, where Shawnee Chief Tecumseh led a coalition of Native American nations.

Harrison and his successors pursued a policy of leveraging these debts to induce tribal leaders to sign new treaties ceding large swaths of collectively-held reservation land and then to agree to the tribe's removal.

As incentives to induce tribal leaders to sign such treaties, the government gave them individual deeds and other personal perks, such as building one chief a mansion.

In 1846, the government forced the tribe's rank-and-file to leave, but several major families who had acquired private property to live on through this practice were exempted and permitted to stay in Indiana, creating a bitter schism.

[16] Those who affiliated with the tribe were moved to first to Kansas, then to Oklahoma, where they were given individual allotments of land rather than a reservation as part of efforts to make them assimilate into the American culture of private property and yeoman farming.

311 was introduced in the Indiana General Assembly in 2011 to formally grant state recognition to the tribe, giving it sole authority to determine its tribal membership,[20][21] but the bill did not advance to a vote.