Missouria

The Missouria or Missouri (in their own language, Niúachi, also spelled Niutachi) are a Native American tribe that originated in the Great Lakes region of what is now the United States before European contact.

[2] The tribe belongs to the Chiwere division of the Siouan language family, together with the Ho-Chunk, Winnebago, Iowa, and Otoe.

French colonists adapted a form of the Illinois language-name for the people: Wimihsoorita, which translates as "One who has dugout canoes".

[3] In their own Siouan language, the Missouri call themselves Niúachi, also spelled Niutachi, meaning "People of the River Mouth.

Later, their oral history says that they split from the Otoe tribe, which belongs to the same Chiwere branch of the Siouan language, because of a love affair between the children of two tribal chiefs.

Their society was even more disrupted by the high fatalities from epidemics of smallpox and other Eurasian infectious diseases that accompanied contact with Europeans.

They relocated to the Otoe-Missouria reservation, created on the Big Blue River at the Kansas-Nebraska border.

Under the Dawes Act, by 1907 members of the tribes were registered and allotted individual plots of land per household.